Many marketers spend a lot of money and resources on translations every day. So it's not surprising that you come across many service providers who only have a facade.
As with other services that play a critical role in marketing and product management, there are tens of thousands of translation providers, and not all of them are professional enough to match your expectations.
It takes a keen eye and extensive experience in the marketing field and your industry to spot genuine service providers. When you are looking for a product-related translation, you are actually looking for a team of highly experienced people who know the translation and other related fields and content types.
A professional marketing translation service provider must have years of knowledge, tens of thousands of localization projects completed, as well as localization strategies and a deep understanding of the cultural preferences of the target audience in terms of the way they prefer to be communicated with.
When you decide and make the difficult decision to spend $100,000 on a translation service provider, you need to make sure that the translation service provider has an extensive background in the market. This amount, if invested wisely, can bring you an ROI of 150%. Or even more.
Read on to learn more about how to spend your translation budget, avoid common pitfalls on the way and get the 100% results you want.
Consider the following points before hiring a translation agency for your next project.
Quality assurance plays a very important role in translation and localization quality control. Translation companies must have quality assurance procedures in place for all the services they offer during the production and delivery process. It is particularly important in the localization of marketing assets and software.
QA is, in fact, controlling each step to ensure that it reaches its final form perfectly or with minimum defects before going to market or reaching any other stage.
Localization QA is an essential part of the localization process. There are many aspects to localization quality assurance, including verifying that translations and localizations meet the quality standards required by the business, checking for consistency between different localized versions of a product, and identifying any problems with the text, layout, or even functionality.
Linguistic quality assurance (LQA) tool is one of the important tools used to identify and correct linguistic issues in localization. LQA helps the localization team to ensure that the translations are error-free, accurate, and culturally appropriate.
LQA is an important stage in the localization process as it enables cross-functional teams working on the project to achieve the desired level of quality of multilingual content before it goes to functional testing. If properly done, it limits the number of rounds QA testers need to work on both localization QA and other quality control steps.
So, if you don't have a proper localization QA process in place, most probably your spelling, grammar, punctuation, and terminology in the target language will be all over the place and full of inconsistencies when they reach the team that's next in line. This means there will be endless back-and-forth that leads to churning time, money, and other resources. Timelines and market expectations are tight enough to afford such mistakes.
This could be easily avoided by having appropriate localization testers and other necessary localization testing resources next to reviewers, proofreading specialists, and linguists.
To come up with a quality product you need a QA team that will professionally run your localization QA program.
As much as LQA is, there are other important mistakes you want to avoid. Because if you make them, even the best quality assurance won't get you out of trouble. Check them out.
For any organization or business, correctly targeting the right audience is crucial. Marketing teams sometimes come up with fancy ideas for their marketing campaigns but fail to localize their content. This localization of content for the specific region sometimes takes the form of transcreation. A translator ensures that all the essential components of the content remain intact while still conveying the same message. Very often, a few versions are produced when transcreating the source language text. That's why the cost of this service is 2 times higher than translation and localization. Only copywriting is more expensive.
The good news is that you are not left empty-handed if you don't have a budget for transcreation. Professional translation and localization are the best way to go for over 95% of business use cases and scenarios to guarantee your product or service success in global markets.
What's really important is that your marketing content builds an emotional and cultural connection with your target audience. Cultural connection involves much more than just keeping the linguistic components intact. The images, CTAs, video content, and in some cases, movie references are more important than we think. Imagine an Indian company marketing its product and citing a movie reference that is not remotely relevant to the context needed for your local market.
How would you feel about that?
Terrible!
This is what happens when such a reference is translated into another language and loses its meaning. Many things have to be replaced with alternatives. Some elements have to be deleted from the original text altogether to make it more understandable. At this point, you need professional translation services, online or in person.
93% of people, both in B2C and B2B, start looking for products and services on Google or other search engines. That's why SEO is considered the most sought-after method to promote your content and drive more traffic to your website, blog, or social media handle. While SEO is a great tool, it can also ruin your image online if done poorly.
When we look at local SEO, we are very careful about every aspect of content publishing because it makes sense. However, when translating the most important CTAs or other meaningful content of their marketing campaign, many ignore the aspects they have taken care of in their language. For example, you have created a perfect marketing campaign for your product in English. Content optimization is meticulously done and everything. Every keyword is taken care of. You do everything right, but when the same product is marketed in another country, such as Japan, you miss out on some important keywords due to a poorly done translation. This can affect business more than you can imagine. It's one thing if you have no visitors to your website because of your SEO mistakes. It's quite another thing if visitors leave your website because of incorrect and untrustworthy content. That's why we call this disastrous international SEO. It can either make or break your online presence.
International SEO should be considered the top priority when it comes to localization and preserving the expressions of the local language. It requires much more attention than it is usually given. Do not think that just because you have done keyword research in your language you're done here. You cannot continue it like most other things. You need to start from scratch and approach everything methodically, paying attention to every little detail.
Because when search engine optimization is done right, it can do wonders for you. And if search engine optimization is international, then the translation should also be done with real hands-on experience.
Related content: 7 Rules of Great Translation Quality Assurance
No, we are not going to compete between them in any way - because there is no competition at all. Of course, this does not mean that there are no good freelancers. It is not easy to find a freelancer or a team of freelancers who can do the job as well as a translation service provider company. The reason is that there are so many people who work as freelancers with beginners in this field. Then there are those who have experience and knowledge. Thanks to vendor management, a translation and localization agency can effectively source the suppliers.
However, since a freelancer usually does not have enough resources to handle large volumes, they silently outsource your work to other freelancers. Apart from other issues here, there's an obvious breach of confidentiality in this situation.
That's why outsourcing your work to a freelancer is way too risky if you do not have the time and resources to coordinate translations like vendor or project managers. There will be last-minute revisions. There will be some adjustments to the deadline. There will be more glitches than expected. And all of this will make your job more and more complex. This will slow you down and put your launch at risk.
The best you can get is a partial refund if the work is submitted through a reliable freelance marketplace. You will not care about the small fees you paid the freelancer for a big project. You will not even want him to reimburse you for the money you spent - but for the time. Time is a critical factor when working with freelancers. Having freelancers do your work comes at the expense of your valuable time. We always recommend small businesses start their outsourcing with reliable freelancers. However, when they start to grow into a bigger business, the time for any other task seems to be limited. You can not chase the freelancers while holding regular meetings and preparing strategies
All business owners and executives want their work to be done seamlessly and professionally. This is where professional translation service providers come in. Professional service providers will first ask you questions that will help them understand the depth of your project. They will ask and research. With the proper resources, they will also be able to suggest some details that you may have overlooked.
So, again, we are not advising anyone against getting marketing translations done by freelancers. We just want to draw attention to what goes on in the background of some non-professional freelancers.
As mentioned earlier, you cannot choose machine translation without any quality control like post-editing, and get away with it. Yet, many people still try. To save a few dollars, they use machine translation only. This, in turn, hurts the overall translation experience. The main goal when translating a marketing text or other high-visibility target market content should be the end user and their experience, which can only be done by a human - preferably a team of professionals.
An honest local translation partner can do wonders for you. They will ensure that the translation is of high quality, and his understanding of the jargon will make it much more reliable. The easiest way to do this is to always use multiple resources. You can never rely on what a machine has to do. To make your marketing texts stand out from the crowd, you need real people who understand your goal and also know the preferences of the target audience. Machine translation may not be among them.
Related content: 6 Reasons Why Your Team May Fail at Translation Quality Review
These are some of the most common and avoidable mistakes that most people make. You may have the best LQA operations in the world and still, this nightmare will repeat again and again: "I spent $100K on translation and see no results! Why me again?!"
So now it's time for some tips on how to avoid such errors in the first place and make your translation texts stand out from the competition. Here they are.
As a business owner, you may not want to deal with the tedious task of research. But at some point in the business, it's essential to deal with it. If you want your sales team to do their best, you usually entice them with an incentive. Similarly, if you need to be involved in the project yourself. Here, the incentive is for your company, but there is no one to entice you. You can only get more involved if you understand how these efforts will pay off for you in the long run. And that incentive or reward is the successful initiation of the campaign. Followed by a big success. Followed by more new customers. And finally, the increase in your ROI.
Keep your eye on your reward and get on it. The research a person can do for their own business is always stronger than one done by external professionals. Even if someone can't research well, that's no excuse to avoid it. It is better if the person learns it and then does it for better results. An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
It sounds obvious that a business owner or executive needs to understand their potential market. People often misjudge their target market, which results in a misplaced effort to get the message across. If you really want to make a lasting impression, you need to be fully professional here. It is always better to look at your competitors to better understand the target market and the way it works. Especially if we are talking about multiple local markets worldwide, with different cultures and languages.
Related content: 6 Powerful Ways to Improve Your In-country Review
Internationalization is a critical part of the software localization and translation process. If you want to get your UI right in different languages to bring the ultimate user experience to your customers, you have to prepare your code for translation. That's what internationalization does.
And when your localized content is back from translation and editing, let your team members do their job on linguistic testing, QA checks, and functional tests.
Inspiration can come from a variety of sources. The best way is to keep an eye on good local websites of the target region and their social media activities. This is also a part of research and analysis but on a more advanced level.
Here, you will not just be crawling through a few websites - you can't do that on your own. Your analysts and research team will do that for you. This includes interactions on a more personal level.
To get the right inspiration, you need the right platform and the right audience. Every region or country has its own style and preferred online platforms where people hang out the most. Reddit, for example, is a good platform to learn about the latest trends and interactions of people in the US. Almost 50% of Reddit's visitors come from the US alone. This is followed by Canada, the UK, and Australia. Check the questions they ask, and what their common concerns are so that you can better understand them. Quora may be a great choice here, too.
Spending money on translations is not the same as spending money on an average professional business service. So much to take care of, so little time, and so much at stake. We're sure you've noticed: translation and localization service providers love to tell the whole world how great their quality is all the time. The problem is that it's hard to tell who's really a dream supplier for you as we all sound the same, don't we? Talk is cheap.
The localization industry offers a great many opportunities for businesses that want to be successful with their products in the international markets. You just need to know these options and make informed buying decisions. Only this way can you avoid common errors. With the right partner by your side, you can be sure that all the necessary quality assurance processes, tools, and people are in place and your users will be delighted when they buy your product. If your potential language service provider has these, it's always a good sign.
This way, you will save time, resources, and, of course, your hard-earned money. So, what are you waiting for? Build your localization QA program now, hire localization QA testers and conquer the world of multilingual content. Go and grow!
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