40% of people are not likely to buy on a site that is not in their native local language. Here Ofer Tirosh explains the benefits of a translation service for your business.
British firms mustn’t communicate via English only. Besides the UK’s international language diversity, suppliers and customers appreciate conversing within their native language. It helps overcome cultural or communication barriers between suppliers and employees and can make customers feel like the company recognizes them. Here are five reasons it is important to have a translation service and beneficial for the growth of the business.
#1 – local, relevant content
You’ll need to concentrate on local content adaptations if you’re looking to integrate your company into a new business style. This helps make every aspect of a brand or message properly fit into local culture. The process of updating local content may:
- Change graphics to reflect the new language or reflect the local population
- Modify the design of a message to ensure it is compatible with the new language, for example, making sure that text reads vertically rather than horizontally and is easy to read on a page.
- Check that the product or service you’re marketing complies with local regulations, including privacy and disclosure laws.
- Beware of messages that are sensitive to culture.
- Make small adjustments to ensure that the message or product appears natural, akin to the symbols of currency or address formats.
#2 – social media outreach
Social media is a great means to engage with potential customers and expand your company. Certain companies even use it to communicate with business partners and employees. Here are some suggestions to ensure you address your customers and business associates in their language of origin and cultural context on social media.
Find out the top online communication platforms for the language or region you’re looking to interact in. For instance, China uses Renren rather than Facebook.
Be familiar with the best way to write on every platform. Instagram is more focused on photos than Twitter, which tends to use shorter posts. Facebook can take in some posts that are slightly longer.
Be aware that translating posts on social media will require constant effort. Facebook accounts with more than 10,000 followers saw the highest number of clicks per post when they shared their content between 31 and 60 every month. The highest number of posts with the most clicks for all kinds of accounts was for accounts published up to five times every month. This is a common cost, so be sure you include this in your marketing budget.
Social media posts must have professional translations. Social media is a very casual medium, so it needs to communicate with people in a way that sounds both native and natural. Poor translations can be offensive to local cultures or seem stilted. Many social media users stop following companies because they believe the content is insensitive or offensive.
#3 – SEO of websites and Translation Service
SEO involves optimizing a site to ensure that search engines can recognize it. International SEO is optimising a website in a manner that informs search engines of the countries you’re targeting or the languages you’re using. Although it may sound complicated, it’s just an issue of following specific steps. To make a website be ranked in a different region, you’ll need to:
- Choose a URL structure compatible with the norms of the specific area you’re trying to reach. This is the international variant of how a UK website is likely to include co. Uk as the last part of their website addresses.
- Use language tags within the HTML code to inform search engines what language(s) you use.
- Of course, translate the content of the website to the new language.
There are various other strategies you could use. You could host your site using a local IP within this new area. You can create hyperlinks from regional resources to your site. You could also determine the search engines that are more popular in the region and focus on those, as Google is not used everywhere.
#4 – Make it more user-friendly
Forty per cent of people don’t buy from sites which are not in their native language; therefore, the need for a translation service is vital for businesses that want to connect with people who speak a different local language or internationally.
E-commerce websites also have to consider local customs. When you update an e-commerce website, it may be necessary to change some aspects of how it is built. Along with translating the content, you might require modifying your website’s layout to make it easier for users to understand the language in which it is. It is also possible to change the formatting of various details like currencies on the product pages and checkout carts and formats for phone numbers and addresses for the contact page. Additionally, you might have to modify the graphics to meet local standards, like taking local landmarks in photos or replacing images featuring models who reflect the local population.
Local content updates will also ensure that an online store complies with local laws, such as privacy or cookie notification. Additionally, it ensures that the message or product will be adapted to the community’s culture and language in a manner that is simple to comprehend and not offensive. To achieve this, the process could require changing the words to remove certain references or words that don’t translate into the language into which the message has been translated.
#5 – targeted email marketing campaigns
It is easy to manage the marketing of your emails using services like Constant Contact, iContact, HubSpot or MailChimp. You must, however, ensure that your emails are translated by an experienced company so that they can be read when translated into the language of your choice.
A translation service could examine an email marketing campaign in a way that machines cannot. A human translator can:
- Be sure that the tone of your email remains the same from one language to the next.
- Send the email out so it can be used in any language.
- Change or remove any item that could be offensive to the cultural norms
- Create an email that is tailored to specific usage habits. These can vary from region to area
Marketing also uses many figurative words that require extensive cultural awareness to translate. Machines are often unable to comprehend this.
If an email appears unprofessional or unprofessional in some way, the receiver is more likely to discard it because of spam. You can improve the likelihood of reaching more clients or business partners by ensuring that your emails look professional in any language.
