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...
