Businesses have increasingly been using the Internet as a tool to market their products in different places around the world and to different cultures and language groups. One of the most useful tools is translation services as they are able to market and present product information through the business’s website by translating it into key languages around the world. These website translation services come in different forms such as machine translators such as Google translate and real life human translators. Many businesses prefer to copy their website content into Google translate and then copy and paste the translated product back into their website.
Unfortunately, this word-for-word way of translating is not always the best way to get a good translation and market your company’s products to the global market. A good example of a mistranslation recently was Kentucky Fried Chicken’s “Finger Lickin’ Good” catch phrase which when translated to Chinese emerged as “We’ll Eat Your Fingers Off!”
Making mistakes like the KFC one can cause problems but there are other translation mistakes that are not so easy to pick up such as understanding the way different cultures act towards certain products and the way the translations have to be adapted to suit any cultural influences. For example, the way Spanish is spoken by Spaniards differs from the way Colombians use the language so if words are mistranslated not allowing for these differences the reader will be confused and if it’s a website will not return to that page. This is where human input is important because a good Spanish translator for a Colombian audience will check for different word usages and ensure there are no ambiguities in the translation.
To save all the worry of providing a poor translation of your product information and making your website look bad you should ensure a human translator has contributed to the translation. Most human translators may well use machine translators to get the bare bones of the translation but then they will tweak the final translation by ensuring the language fits the likely readers of the website. When a marketing translation company takes on a website translation job it will ensure the right translator is matched with the job who is familiar with the nuances of the language that the translation is for.
Unfortunately, this word-for-word way of translating is not always the best way to get a good translation and market your company’s products to the global market. A good example of a mistranslation recently was Kentucky Fried Chicken’s “Finger Lickin’ Good” catch phrase which when translated to Chinese emerged as “We’ll Eat Your Fingers Off!”
Making mistakes like the KFC one can cause problems but there are other translation mistakes that are not so easy to pick up such as understanding the way different cultures act towards certain products and the way the translations have to be adapted to suit any cultural influences. For example, the way Spanish is spoken by Spaniards differs from the way Colombians use the language so if words are mistranslated not allowing for these differences the reader will be confused and if it’s a website will not return to that page. This is where human input is important because a good Spanish translator for a Colombian audience will check for different word usages and ensure there are no ambiguities in the translation.
To save all the worry of providing a poor translation of your product information and making your website look bad you should ensure a human translator has contributed to the translation. Most human translators may well use machine translators to get the bare bones of the translation but then they will tweak the final translation by ensuring the language fits the likely readers of the website. When a marketing translation company takes on a website translation job it will ensure the right translator is matched with the job who is familiar with the nuances of the language that the translation is for.
No comments:
Post a Comment