FREE WEBINAR ALERT! Come one, come all to hear Acclaro Globalization Architect, Jon Ritzdorf, present “Website Translation: Conquering new Language Markets to Gain New Sales” on Tuesday, January 31, at 9 AM Pacific / 12 PM Eastern. If you are looking to expand your global reach, Jon will give you valuable tips to consider for your international web presence. Click through for more information and registration.
Exciting news for oenophiles! Luxury winery Opus One, forged from a partnership between Baron Philippe de Rothschild and Robert Mondavi, recently partnered with Acclaro to localize their retail website for customers in four countries.
In the world of translation, even fast-food gets into the act. Take, for example, the "Dark Vador" (no, that’s not a typo) burgers that are so popular right now in Quick fast-food resturants in France. As explained in this article from the Christian Science Monitor, these black-bunned burgers are being marketed in sync with the release of "Star Wars: Phantom Menace 3D". Bun aside, you may be wondering why Darth Vader’s name has changed. Well, young Jedi, it’s as much what you say as how you say it.
If you have an English website, you know that banner ads bring customers to your site. If you want to reach out to global audiences by localizing your website, localizing your banner ads will help drive traffic to your site, as they do in English. Localizing banner ads isn't always as straightforward as you might think. You may have to customize your banner ad campaign based on regional or geographical preferences, or re-create content that you don't have in English. We'll explain how to set up your global banner ad campaign for success.
If you’re thinking about testing—or even diving into—the waters of the rapidly growing Chinese social media market, now is the time to start doing your research. With more than 400 million Internet users, most of them young, educated, and savvy about games and web socializing, there’s ample opportunity for well-prepared businesses to succeed.
We’ve got a few ideas to help you get familiar with Chinese online channels as you start out, and expand into this lucrative market in a way that’s culturally appropriate. More detail can be found in our full newsletter article.
What does 2012 rhyme with? Opportunity. Specifically, opportunity
for you to:
There’s more good news; you don’t have to go it alone. At Acclaro, we specialize in the very services you need to reach these objectives: website localization and globalization.
A few fun facts for you:
If you’ve been thinking about going
international with your search engine marketing efforts, make sure to read the
latest piece by Acclaro president Michael Kriz, right here on our
site. We’re also proud to say that it was originally published in the September
2011 issue of the American Marketing Association’s subscription-only MarketingNews.
It’s often said that language and translation
are two of the biggest obstacles to successfully launching and managing a brand
in global markets. Many businesses spend millions to create beautiful campaigns
in their primary markets, and then those funds — and sometimes the company’s reputation along
with it — go down the drain because they skimp on
localization when they roll out their campaigns globally. From the poorly
translated menus and signs to major mishaps that cost companies millions of
dollars, the examples are many — and embarrassing:
Translating your
website goes a long way towards establishing your local presence in a global
market. A local-language blog can take you another step further, with marketing
benefits that equal that of your English-language blog. But is this the right
step for your organization? Get the scoop on what we mean, take a minute to answer these questions, then read
on.
Due to the prevalence of English-language searches in China, a unique partnership has formed between the Chinese search giant Baidu and the American "decision engine" Bing. Baidu users searching for English terms will see a selection of English search results alongside Chinese results in their browsers, providing access to an additional layer of information.
Bilingual search results, still a relatively new technology, show how the quest for information on a global scale overcomes regional language barriers...or perhaps caters to an increasingly polylingual group of internet users who are comfortable searching in one or more languages.
Language is a fluid and dynamic means of communication. Historically, translation has been best performed by human beings who can accurately adapt and express this fluidity and dynamism in the face of the logical contradictions and irregularities that most languages present. However, in recent years, “machine translation” (or MT) has started to come into its own, as its once-stoic technology – the realm of 0s and 1s – catches up to human adaptability.
Ora Solomon, vice president of sales and operations at Acclaro, describes how machine translation can complement human translation in an article for Marketing Profs:
1. Human Translation
Definition
A professional linguist (most often, an in-country native speaker) reviews your project and, using guidelines agreed on beforehand, translates it to the language you require. The goal is to speak to your audience in the most natural, effective way. You can expect human translations to be free of idiomatic errors and to flow naturally and fluently.
In Spanish they say, “Lo bueno, si breve, dos veces bueno.” The good, when brief, is
doubly good. Brevity is considered a virtue in most communication circles. In
the world of translation, however, brevity is even more: it’s a money saver.
The first thing any localization vendor will tell you about the cost of translation is that it's a direct function of word count. The more words your document, brochure, program, app or website contains, the higher the cost for translating it. Rather straightforward, right?
Containing your localization budget through reducing word count at the pre-translation stage requires a challenging time investment on your part, as no one can really perform an “audit” of your resources in your stead. To execute this effectively, you need either to distinguish between must-have and nice-to-have content through a complete content review, or pare down all of your source texts across the board through avid and diligent editing. It would definitely be easier to simply send all of your files to your language partner and hope for the best.
Yet when implemented, this phase of content review will ultimately pay off two-fold: it will save you a good sum of money on translation across all target languages, and it will make your end product better, since content that has been reviewed with a global audience in mind can be rendered more accurately.
Here are a few ideas for reducing your content as you go global with your program or product.
A picture is worth a thousand words.
What are some ingenious ways to do away with words in the context of your product? You may have the ability to substitute appropriate imagery, for example. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words. Take the example of the Apple iPhone OS. English has the wonderful benefit of offering two practical and short words for the settings buttons: on/off. But in most languages, the translation would occupy the whole width of the phone screen and result in what we call TVA: total visual awkwardness. Here is what Apple did to solve that problem:
Writers these days, whether for websites, software, or documentation, face interesting
new challenges when communicating technical material and product info to a
broad-based international audience. In a recent article for the Content Wrangler, Acclaro President Michael
Kriz offers up compelling
insights and ten useful tips to help you create content for your diverse global
audience.
As we become an increasingly global economy, there is increasing demand on writers — particularly those who work with technical language that describes products and services — to adapt to the changing needs of companies’ customer demographics. When a product is slated to launch in 20 new markets, and over half of the markets require translation of documentation, it completely changes the game for the technical writer. So, to effectively scale a global business, you and your writers should keep a few things in mind.
1. Use global English – For every native speaker of English, there are about three non-native speakers. It’s important that your communication in English is understandable to all English speakers, which means short, simple sentences and no idiomatic expressions or cultural references.
Ready to take your brand from domestic
to international markets? Whether you're setting out on an all-out global brand
launch, or tailoring your efforts to a few well-chosen foreign language markets
closer to home, your best first step is a well-thought-out plan to set your
strategy and make some realistic goals.
That way, you can streamline your efforts and do what gets you the most impact for your budget. In many cases, you can (and should) leverage your existing brand assets in new language markets. Done right, finessing and tailoring what you already own with localization and smart multilingual translation can be highly effective in making that all-important first impression in new international arenas.
To help get you get started on your strategy and goals, here are five great tips that can lead to smart, culturally sensitive localization as you move into new language markets.
1. Do your research to find the best potential markets.
The fastest-growing economies (like Brazil, India, and China) may look like a sure bet for your brand. But with a little research, you may find that Eastern Europe is where your brand will find its greatest initial success. Think about your differentiator in new markets, unique trends, and how you might need to reposition your brand as you localize for a global launch. Surveys plus attitude and usage studies are excellent ways to take the pulse of the locals, too — get to know your target customers, their likes and dislikes, influencers, hobbies, and where they shop.
Do you parquear your car? How about vacunar the carpet? If you're one of the 34+ million of Spanish speakers in the U.S., you may understand this mix of Spanish and English perfectly well. And you may even expect to hear or read this Spanglish in advertising.
The purchasing power of the Hispanic population is currently valued at $1
trillion (that's a lot of dolares). Read on to learn some tips on how to
create
culturally-specific marketing campaigns for this growing market.
Learn about the demographic. Hispanics in the States come from 20+ different countries (although a majority, around 60%, are of Mexican origin). Culturally, they tend to be travel between two worlds — their native culture and American culture. Skim through Hispanic magazines, watch Latino TV shows and listen to Spanish-language radio. You don't have to speak Spanish fluently to get an appreciation of the look and feel of the advertisements that target this demographic.
Mobile advertising is definitely here to stay. In fact, across
all advertising media, it’s quickly emerging as the global dominator, second only
to online video. How does mobile advertising work and which foreign markets
offer the most promise for your mobile campaign? Here’s the 411:
Quick Facts
The figures will make your head spin:
Guest author Christine Kent is an editor with the Content Bureau, a full-service copywriting agency.
The process of transcreation requires
writers and translators to come up with alternatives for the idiomatic and
casual language often used in marketing campaigns, particularly for consumer
products and advertising. However, for some marketing pieces, the transcreation
process can be made vastly 
easier by simply writing clean, usable copy from the
very beginning. In other words, assume that your text will need to be
translated down the road, and from the get-go, avoid piling on the clichés and
idioms.
(Whoops, I’ve already broken this rule in the line above: “down the road,” “get-go,” and “piling on” would not make life easier for writers doing a transcreation. Lucky for me, we’re not planning to get this blog post translated!)
This “think before you write” approach makes sense for some, not all, marketing pieces. Ad campaigns usually demand highly colloquial language, especially for taglines—better to write them in the fashion required for the initial audience, then recast the copy into another language using idioms that convey the same idea. However, product brochures, fact sheets, and white papers likely don’t require the use of much untranslatable wording, so it makes more sense to tone down the casual lingo in these documents.
We’ve already written about the importance of a glossary and
why it’s important to create one before 
starting any major translation effort —
whether it be for technical documentation, marketing communications, web,
software, eLearning, or multimedia projects. Now, let’s look at what should be
included in a glossary.
What goes into a glossary?
What should a glossary look like?
A glossary can be a complex database or a simple spreadsheet. It depends on your global reach and the size of your overall globalization efforts. If you are just starting out, you may just want to use an Excel spreadsheet. Then you can work your way up to a more complex database.
The Acclaro blog entry below is featured today on the Content Bureau Blog. The Content Bureau is a full-service copywriting agency that creates custom content for business, consumer, and technical audiences.
You and your team have spent hundreds of collective hours and thousands of dollars on the launch of a great marketing campaign in English. Along the way, everyone gained a few new grey hairs. Whew! You’re done, right? Bring out the Champagne, bonus checks and hair dye. Not so fast…your boss wants to take that campaign into eight new language markets. Now you need a great global campaign.
How do you ensure that your campaign maintains the impact of the original without having to launch new creative in each market? This is where marketing “transcreation” comes into play. Transcreation is a freer form of translation, closer to copywriting. The result is a text that’s linguistically and culturally adapted for specific countries and/or regions, be it for Latin America, Africa, Europe or even local U.S. Hispanic markets.
This past year we saw several examples of global brands that used
cultural and linguistic differences to their advantage, taking a unique
cross-cultural approach to marketing and advertising.
One of these was the iconic American brand Levi's and their Nuevo Pionero campaign.
In this campaign that showed a truly "adventurous" approach to catching the eye of the young, bi-cultural Latino market, Levi's took five young U.S. Hispanics on a journey this summer from Alaska to Argentina on the Pan-American Highway. This literal and metaphorical journey from North to South shows the five travelers fully clad in Levi's new Work Wear line, stopping in ten different cities and pitching in on work projects involving the arts. Their experiences were documented in a ten-week reality show, "Norte a Sur: Una Ruta, 5 Experiencias" (North to South: One Route, 5 Experiences), that aired in the fall on Discovery en Español.
Smart, fun and useful. Acclaro shares news and tips on translation, localization, language, global business and culture.