Several Ways to Market Translation Services The Government of Canada’s Translation Bureau engaged PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP to conduct a benchmarking and comparative analysis study of the linguistic services industry in Canada and globally in 2012. The global language services industry is highly fragmented: there are a small number of large companies such as Bowne global solutions and Lionbridge which account for less than 5% of the worldwide market. The study demonstrated that today the global market includes over 25,000 organizations that offer different types of translations services, often in a limited geographic range. This means that the translation services market is getting more and more competitive each year, and to survive, translation agencies and independent translators need to pay strict attention to their marketing strategies. Independent translators need to be noticed, and one of the ways to do that is direct email. First, it is important to prepare a high-quality digital package that contains information about your education, mother tongue and language pairs, subject areas, translation/interpreting/voice-over skills, contact information, etc. Your documents have to be well organized, with references from clients if possible. Translators should contact as many translation agencies or companies as possible and say that you are available for work. Never forget about networking with people who work with foreign languages, translation, and international business, as they can help you find clients. Translation agencies, in turn, need to keep their websites current to attract customers and update the language list they are working with, how quick their service is, and their rates. It is also crucial to promote their services on social media as one of the key...
Localization Our enormous mysterious world, which in ancient Indian mythology was believed to be resting on the backs of four huge elephants, has turned into something easily accessible due to the Internet and social media. When a business becomes global and wants to connect with customers around the world, in any web strategy, including social and mobile media, localization is the key element. Localization can bring great value to a company. Today, world-class organizations generate more than 60% of their revenue outside of their domestic market by initiating contact with global markets rich with opportunities. In other words, products and services get better results and attract target audiences more successfully when localized versions are available. For many years standardization has been a powerful strategy in consumer markets. However large chains face a huge problem: they have so many outlet stores open that they don’t have any more room to expand. When they find an attractive location to build another store, they face resistance from community activists. Another problem they face is lack of innovation: managers become so focused on meeting tight operational targets that they intentionally avoid any experimentation. Fortunately for companies, the era of standardization is coming to its end with the opportunity to expand due to localization. Retail giants such as Best Buy, Tesco, and VF have benefited from the new system by localizing their products. Focusing on a particular local market means improving resonance, engagement, and commerce. For example, Starbucks and Blackberry feature localized content on webpages aimed at specific countries, and this has increased interaction as much as 10 – 15 times compared to pages...
Freelance vs In-house Translators If you want to build a career in translation, you need to decide whether you want to work as a freelance or in-house translator. What is the difference between these two positions and what are their pros and cons? Translators can either work for themselves as independent contractors, for a translation department of a company, or for a translation agency or organization. Those translators who work independently are called freelancers, and those who work for agencies and companies are in-house translators. An in-house position is attractive because it provides a translator with regular office hours and a stable income. A translator works on texts that the company or agency needs translated, attends events and meetings where he/she discusses large-scale translation projects, and goes to training sessions to learn about new equipment or software tools. An in-house translator has paid vacation, insurance, and other benefits typical of this type of office job. On the other hand, working for a company or agency means adjusting your work style and methods to those of the company, and potentially you could get tired of translating the same type of text over and over. Freelancers, on the other hand, set their own rates and can work whenever they want to, in any corner of the planet. They also must take care of their own marketing, invoicing, accounts payable and receivable, etc. Freelance translators can earn more per year that in-house translators, but their income is variable, and they have to take care of expenses such as taxes, insurance, and other business costs. On the other hand, marketing one’s self is a...
Film Translation While watching a foreign movie with dubbing or multilingual subtitles, do you ever wonder why the film is so successful, even though it wasn’t made in your native language? The answer may be quite simple – it is translated, and translation has certain advantages and disadvantages which can influence an audience’s reaction. This is what we are going to talk about today – film translation. Film has always been a powerful tool and a ubiquitous source of ideas in every culture. Entertainment and business are inseparably bound in this industry. Movies are not just a national property; on the contrary, they go far beyond national borders and attract global attention and recognition, resulting in a huge economic impact for the film industry on the international market. The international market, in turn, cannot be imagined without a team of translators whose primary goal is to establish communication between cultures. During the silent film era, intertitles would be placed throughout the movie to provide the viewer with dialogue. These intertitles were easily replaced by identical titles translated into the target language. However silent films gave way to speaking movies, and film companies faced a huge problem making their movies understood in different countries. American film companies found a solution: they produced multi-language versions of the same film. Actors who could demonstrate proficiency in several languages were in great demand. However, this practice turned out to be absolutely unprofitable, and very soon it was abandoned and replaced with the modes that are being practised nowadays. These modes include dubbing, subtitling, voice-over, narration, and commentary. Dubbing is the process of adding...
Translation Challenges Some people strongly believe that knowledge of two languages is enough for a person to be a translator; that it is easy to take a word or phrase and convert it to another language! We wish everything would be so simple. The history of translation proves that it is much more of a challenge than that. Sometimes a word is simply untranslatable in a target language. All translators can do in this case is give a descriptive translation that attempts to convey the meaning of the original text. Here is a list of some untranslatable words which always puzzle even the most experienced language professionals: Tingo (Pascuense) – to gradually steal all of the possessions out of a neighbour’s house by borrowing and not returning. I am pretty sure that all of us can find at home some things we have ‘tingo’ed from our friends or neighbours! What can be more romantic than waking up early in the morning with the purpose of going outside to hear the birds’ sing? Looks like it is a very common activity in Sweden as they have a corresponding word: Gökotta. Sometimes I am desperately looking for a word that means: a face badly in need of fist. Guess what! Germans actually have this word: Backpfeifengesicht. Maybe in your neighbourhood there lives a very interesting lady, usually old and lonely, and her biggest passion in life is to ‘collect’ cats. Italians call such ladies gattara. Do you know this wordless yet meaningful look shared by two people who both desire to initiate something but both don’t want to start? Everybody knows...
Translation to Spanish Spanish is the third-largest spoken language in the world; it is spoken by almost 420 million people. Because of this, translation from English to Spanish is very important for expanding business opportunities. We would like to share some important information regarding the translation from English to Spanish with you. The first point to note regarding translation from English to Spanish is the specific type of Spanish that is required. Translation from English to Spanish is not the same in every Spanish-speaking country. You may already know that Spanish is spoken in more than 20 countries as a native or official language, and each country has its own history, culture and social systems. Needless to say, Spanish in Spain is different from Spanish in Latin America, and furthermore, Latin American Spanish is different in each Latin American country. The word ‘T-shirt’ for example, is translated as ’remera’ in Argentina, ‘playera’ in Mexico, and ‘camiseta’ in Central America and other countries. If you have no clue which Spanish you should translate to, the safest option is to translate into a neutral Spanish that will be widely understood. In addition, translating from English to Spanish entails different levels of difficulty than translating from English to other languages. Which do you think is easier, translation from English to Spanish or translation from English to Japanese? Translation from English or other Western languages to Japanese is not easy, since Japanese has a very different grammatical structure, such as word order and syntax, and no similar words, letters or characters at all. Translation from English to Spanish, on the other hand, looks...
Degrees of Website Localization To make their services attractive for an international audience and encourage cross-cultural communication, companies have started translating and localizing their websites. Website localization is a complex, multi-layered process which must be performed by industry professionals who know how to modify information so that it appeals to the target culture. There are different degrees to which a website can be localized. A basic taxonomy proposes a distinction between monolingual, bilingual, and multilingual sites. Which option you choose depends on the language policy or marketing strategy that your company uses for business communication. Most often, the localization level depends on the importance or size of the local market or audience. Singh & Pereira (2005) suggest five degrees of localization: ‘standardized’ (one website for all countries), ‘semi-localized’ (one site gives information on many countries), ‘localized’ (a whole translated site for each country), ‘highly localized’ (translations and culture-specific adaptations), and ‘culturally customized’ (a new site completely adapted in the target culture). However, we can also find many intermediary stages between these five degrees. For example, general website information can be translated, but specific terminology remains in the source language. Such a concept is called a mode of ‘standardization’. How do organizations choose a particular option? In a market environment, decisions about localization degree highly depend on Return on Investment issues. It means that companies analyze whether the potential benefits of the localization process outweigh the initial investment needed for production of a localized version. What we observe today is that localization is in very high demand and quite profitable because organizations benefit greatly from localized websites effectively communicating their...
Project Management When you think about translators, what do you imagine? Do you see a linguist in a dusty library, huddling over a Latin manuscript, struggling to find a better equivalent to a certain word or phrase? On the one hand, you are right. This is one traditional side of a translator’s working environment. On the other hand, the past decade has seen translation moving far beyond the realm of printed documents into software, websites, databases, and multimedia content. The reason for such changes is the digital revolution, which has given rise to the concept and practice of localization. Today translation is not just a service but a whole industry based on team work, use of the corpus, and informational technologies. The translator needs to develop the skills of a project manager, a computer scientist, a documentalist, an evaluator, a localizer, and a technical writer. In our current international environment, translation agencies now work on massive, multilingual projects. This has made it essential to rely on project managers, who have become an integral part of the translation agency’s workflow as they coordinate the skills, needs, and expertise of multiple resources. Translators and other industry professionals have to work cross-culturally, and professional teams are often geographically distributed. Translators’ working process has to be somehow supervised, and this is where the project manager comes into play. Translation agencies do not perform translation; their main goal is to coordinate translators’ work and to make sure that that translation and localization projects awarded to them by clients are completed on time, within budget and according to the client’s requirements. The translation part of...
WEBSITE LOCALIZATION The Internet is widely considered to be the most revolutionary technology since the printing press. This era of electronic communication has opened up one of the fastest growing business areas: cross-cultural marketing. As we have discussed in previous posts, it is crucial to make sure your website is comprehensible to those in your target country in order for your company to succeed in both domestic and international markets. Thus, an important factor is translating it into the native languages of your target audiences. The Localization Process However, translation itself is only one part of a very complex concept called localization. To make the website appealing to your target cultures, we need to go beyond translation itself. Localization is a multi-layered process which requires both linguistic and cultural knowledge as well as programming skills. Linguistic and cultural knowledge encompasses language knowledge, expressions , cultural perceptions, senses of humor, and pop culture. In addition, there are numerous other factors to take into consideration when modifying the content of a website. These factors include date and time formats, currency formats, units of measure, paper sizes for print-outs, sound files, legal conventions, and many other details that a company has to adapt to the target culture. However, all of these factors are vital to connecting with your audience. Also important in website localization are design elements like images, symbols, and colours. For example, when adding pictures of personnel it is a good idea to tailor them in such a way that they will look appropriate for the target audience. Just like images, symbols can also result in misunderstandings because a particular...
Multilingual Website Translation Have you ever found a perfect website which contained the information or the product you have been looking for, but the website was in a language you can’t understand? So unfortunate! But here is some good news: multilingual website translation if a service offered by more and more companies. Nowadays most marketers have chosen to adapt the print and broadcasting media to language of their target audiences. However, this does not always happen with websites. More than 70% of Internet users speak languages other than English. Also, online shoppers prefer buying from sites that are in their native language. Nonetheless, translation of websites is not a common practice yet. Should translation of websites be a common practice? The answer is yes. Multilingual website translation will give your business the opportunity to communicate to a brand new international audience in their native language. This will result in creating awareness of your brand, service, or product, and ultimately, to financial success for your company. This is one of the most effective ways of drawing new clients’ attention, marketing your business and giving it international status. Website translation is not only important for the international market, but also the domestic one. Canada, for example, is a multicultural and multilingual country. According to the 2011 Census of Population, more than 200 languages were reported to be spoken as mother tongues by Canadian residents. Making your site multilingual demonstrates your companies’ respect and appreciation towards the entire population, regardless of language and cultural background. Furthermore, website translation removes boundaries and contributes to establishing a more inclusive business standard across the globe....
