Communicate and Translate!
Communication is the key to marketing your products and services to millions of potential customers. Translating your documents and web pages will allow you to communicate with a market that right now, knows nothing about your business.
There are over 6,000 languages spoken across the world today. English may be the business language of the world, but it doesn’t guarantee global marketing of your products and services. According to recent studies, English speakers are actually only about 25 to 36 percent of the world’s population. Another estimate states that only 15 percent of companies have a budget for translation services. You can see how you can reach new customers ahead of the competition by translating your documents and web pages into the language of your market.
Quality is suffering under the constant pressure of making a profit. Sacrificing quality by taking a shortcut with automated translation software is one of many pitfalls. The tendency of companies to push for quick results leads to inappropriate translations that are familiar to most of us. General Motors had the “Nova” affair, marketing a car that “doesn’t go” to Central and South America. Electrolux actually made the mistake of marketing a “nothing sucks like an Electrolux” slogan and Clairol tried to sell a curling iron as a “manure stick” on the German market. One last costly mistake is to assume that bi-lingual employees are qualified to review professional translations. Just because an employee speaks another language does not give him or her the knowledge necessary to understand the idioms of the targeted audience. In addition, having a few years of college Spanish doesn’t make your employee qualified to be a Spanish editor. And finally, those employees with the same mother-tongue as the targeted audience are not qualified translators.
Always go to qualified professionals for solving your business communication problems. These professionals know the language of the business, as well as the language of your foreign customers.
