Nowadays, no matter what kind of business you operate, the importance of using translation services is essential for expanding your audience and reaching new customers. While it may appear that the need for translating your companies marketing materials is an unnecessary expense, businesses hoping to reach out to foreign markets to do business or even wishing to communicate with customers and staff around the world, translating company documentation, websites and marketing materials has beneficial results. Here are a few steps that can help your business:
1. Translating Websites and Other Online/Marketing Content
A company’s website is often the first port of call for many prospective customers. The website is the online face of the company and it is essential that the company can be found easily in the customer’s native language and that they are able to clearly navigate the site in order to find what they are looking for. By using a Professional Language Services Provider to carry out your website translation, this will ensure that your online content will be fully localised by qualified and professional linguists. This means that in addition to translating the content to match the style of the original version, the translator will also be able to advise on the how best on how best to portray this in the relevant country based on linguistic and cultural nuances and your target cultural and linguistic demographic; it is about localising the content as well as translating the words.
2. Using Interpreters at Business Meetings, Trade Shows & Sales Meetings
Interpreters can assist with oral communication where there is a group of people who don’t speak the same language and the main benefit for your business is that they can help overcome cultural issues and avoid embarrassing or confusing situations with linguistic or cultural slip-ups. In any business context, first impressions create a lasting impression so it is essential to get it right the first time for your customers.
3. Attract and Maintain More Business
When living in a predominantly English speaking country, it can be easy to believe the myth of the ‘English Speaking Bubble’ and that as native English speakers we do not need learn a second language as native speakers of other languages are doing the hard work by learning by learning English. Despite there being a total of 359 million native English speakers in the world, this figure pales in comparison to the 955 million native Mandarin speakers and the 407 million native Spanish speakers around the world. While English has been a globally dominant language since the days of Empire, and in more recent times, as the language one of the most powerful economies in the world, the US, the global position of English in terms of economic power has been declining, despite what certain industries may believe.
Economic power has been re-shuffled to countries where English as a second language is not traditional, such as the Middle East. The growing markets of Latin America mean that learning Spanish and Portuguese are far more advantageous than learning English, while learning Mandarin, Arabic and Japanese are obviously more beneficial than English for Asian and Middle-Eastern trade partners. As economic power shifts eastwards, it’s important that businesses in English-speaking countries keep up with the changing demands of the market.
