Marketing translation strategies are essential to establishing your business and succeeding when managing a brand or company. If you want to grow your brand and start reaching international markets or other communities, offering your brand’s vision in different languages is key to attracting more customers, partners, and investors.
That’s why marketing translations are one of the most important tools for reaching that goal. In today’s entry, we’ll discuss this specific type of translation and what makes it different from other traditional translations.
What is Market Translation
Marketing translation is more than transposing words into another language. It involves not only language skills but also copywriting knowledge and writing styles.
In this type of translation, aspects such as sales and product knowledge and even humor and understanding of local culture are crucial to building and translating the marketing strategy and reaching the target audience.
3 Things You Should Know About Market Translation
As you can see, marketing translation has more specificities than other translations, and software tools like Text Master might not capture the nuances. Here are three crucial things that you must know about marketing translation:
It has to adapt to the cultural context:
To build a successful marketing campaign in another language, you need to understand the local culture. Language, demographics, religion, history, humor, and the current political landscape are key to reaching the target audience.
Be careful with slogans:
Copywriters carefully create slogans to reach the audience with a catchy phrase that will stick in everyone’s heads and immediately make people associate the product or brand with it. However, slogans can become tricky when translated into other languages. The famous KFC slogan “Finger-lickin’ good” was wrongly translated in China as “Eat your fingers off.” This is definitely not a very appetizing tagline. Slogans need extra attention when working on different idioms.
Design is just as important as words:
Working on a marketing translation project means adapting colors, imagery, and style, which are just as important as words. This step is crucial when translating a whole project because elements like colors and images do not represent the same concepts in every culture or attract the same target audience.
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FAQs
What is marketing translation?
Marketing translation is a specialized type of translation that adapts not only the language but also cultural, demographic, and contextual nuances of marketing materials to resonate with a target audience in different regions.
Why is cultural context important in marketing translation?
Cultural context ensures that your message aligns with the local values, humor, and societal norms, making the marketing more effective and avoiding potential misunderstandings.
What challenges arise when translating slogans?
Slogans often contain cultural or linguistic nuances that don’t translate directly into other languages. Without careful adaptation, translations can result in awkward or confusing messages, as seen in cases like KFC’s misinterpreted slogan in China.
How do design elements factor into marketing translation?
In addition to translating the text, imagery, colors, and overall design should be adapted to suit the cultural preferences and perceptions of the target audience, as these elements may carry different meanings across cultures.