Is Translation Enough, or Do I Need Localisation Too?
The Importance of Accurate Language Conversion
Accurate language conversion, especially in the context of professional translation, is crucial for thesemultiple reasons, including the below:
Preserving intent and meaning: Cultural and contextual nuances are vital, and skilled translation services prioritise the preservation of the content’s essence.
Building trust and credibility: Accurate language translation builds trust between parties.
Cultural sensitivity: Professional translators must be familiar with cultural sensitivities to avoid misrepresentation or causing offence.
Legal, medical, and technical: Inaccuracies can have serious consequences in areas including document translation.
The Evolution of Translation Technologies
- The world’s first machine translation system was introduced in the 1950s by Georgetown University and IBM.
- Computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools first appeared in the mid-20th century.
- Machine translation systems evolved from rule-based to statistical and neural approaches. Neural machine translation’s deep learning function brings significant improvements to online translation quality.
- Translation management systems streamline translation workflows, manage projects, and handle collaboration among translators, checkers, and clients.
- AI-powered translation has revolutionised translation services and advanced accuracy and efficiency.
The Role of Professional Translators and Agencies
Professional translators are able to bridge languages gaps and understand how to adapt content to ensure it resonates perfectly with a target market, here is how:Here’s how professional translators bridge language gaps and facilitate effective communication:
- Translators help organisations transform their products, services, contracts, and manuals for overseas markets. Not only by translating words, but also employing localisation and considering cultural norms, idioms, and local preferences. The effect of localisation on SEO is crucial for matching the internet search methods of different countries.
- A premium online translation agency is familiar with complex legal terminology, thus ensuring that a document translation complies with local regulations.
- Professional translations agencies use strategies like website localisation to preserve a brand’s image across multiple languages and create trust and recognition in overseas markets.
- Surmounting language barriers brings businesses access to potential new markets and can help boost growth. Common Sense Advisory research states that 76% of consumers prefer making a purchase in their own their language, and for 52% language was more important than price.
- The thorough cultural knowledge of a professional translation service produces marketing messages that resonate with local audiences.
The work of translation agencies:
- The best language translation agencies maintain quality by controlling workflows, reviewing translations meticulously, and keeping high standards.
- Agencies can manage large-scale projects, coordinate teams effectively, and meet deadlines.
- They frequently have expertise in specific domains — legal, medical, and technical — and can make sure they assign the most suitable translator to each project.
- Working with scalability, online translation agencies can tackle a wide range of language pairs and volumes of work that ebb and flow.
- Agencies provide support, take care of client needs, and deliver satisfaction.
Challenges in Cultural and Contextual Adaptation
There are threefour key issues at stake:
- Language Barriers: Adapting content language-to-language can be a complicated affair and literal translations might easily miss nuance and context. The solution lies in collaborating with skilled translation services who have an exhaustive understanding of the languages concerned.
- Stereotypes and Biases: Preconceived ideas and stereotypes can hamper effective adaptation, but this can be countered by cultivating cultural awareness, challenging stereotypes, and approaching content with an open mind.
- Handling Sensitive Topics: Because mishandling sensitive topics can bring misunderstandings, it’s important to do some cultural research, consult experts, and meet sensitive subjects with respect and empathy.
- Images, Videos, and Currency: These are key areas of localisation because website images and suchlike that work in one country might be culturally insensitive in another.
Here’s how some companies embarrassed themselves by skimping on localisation:
- Parker Pen’s slogan claimed: ‘It won’t leak in your pocket and embarrass you.’ Yet, when introducing their pens to the Mexican market, the phrase read: ‘It won’t leak in your pocket and make you pregnant’.
- When Coors introduced its ‘Turn It Loose’ beer campaign to the Spanish market, the translated version of the slogan used an expression commonly interpreted as ‘Suffer from diarrhoea’.
- HSBC Bank made the classic mistake of literally translating their US campaign for overseas markets. Their slogan stateside was ‘Assume nothing.’ Too bad the resulting translation was interpreted as ‘Do nothing’.
Future Trends in Global Communication
Here are some examples:
- Artificial intelligence and natural language processing can enhance communication, personalisation, and understanding, and are fast transforming how humans interact with technology.
- Quantum networks promise ultra-secure communication with extra safeguards against hacking. Quantum key distribution and teleportation could also redefine data privacy.
- Big data — data sets that are too large or complex to be dealt with by traditional data-processing application software — can revolutionise personalised communication, targeted marketing, and decision-making.
Conclusion
Understanding the relative merits of translation and localisation is essential as they serve separate purposes:
- Translations deal with words, phrases, and sentences, with a focus on converting content from one language to another while preserving the original meaning. Translation is suitable for technical documents, legal contracts, academic papers, and general communication.
- Localisation adapts content to the cultural and regional context of the target audience, thus going beyond basic translation. It includes not only language but also cultural nuances, date formats, currency, images, and colours, among other things. Ideal applications include apps, marketing materials, user interfaces, and website localisation.
About Us
At TW Languages, our translation and localisation services are geared unerringly towards accuracy, as a lack of clarity could have serious repercussions. Our translators are not just professional in-country linguists, they’re also qualified and experienced in specialist fields and take pride in their localisation skills.
Contact Us
Use the contact form here to give TW Languages the opportunity to impress with our translation and localisation services.
Contact the team at our UK-based head office by calling +44 (0)161 826 8777.
You can also send an email to info@twlanguages.com
