Multilingual marketing makes more sense, and more money, now, more than ever. This is because, in this day and age, everyone is online, all the time. Whether they’re online for recreation as consumers, or they’re doing remote work for their businesses, they’re navigating these spaces, usually in languages they’re comfortable in. And the key to reaching new overseas audiences is translating your content to speak their language. We’ll look at how translation services can increase income flows from all different angles, and specifically, for the multilingual audience.
Coming to Terms: Clarifying the Meaning of Translation Services
The global language services market size hit $49.6 billion in 2019 and is projected to rise to $56 billion by 2021. But the language industry is highly diversified, covering a lot of ground. Leading the way are translation services, which strategizes multilingual marketing to international needs.
“The right approach to multilingual marketing is a combination of understanding the local market, catering to your local audiences’ needs, and then translating in a way that suits them,” says Ofer Tirosh, CEO of Tomedes, a translation services provider that has been serving clients for more than two decades.
These professional services include an adaptation of date and time formats as well as currency and measurement units. They also account for cultural differences between markets. Even if languages are similar, huge variances divide American English and the UK variety, between the Portuguese of Lisbon and the version used in Rio de Janeiro. And that’s just a fraction of the differences when you translate from one language to another.
The translation process covers the conversion of online content, too. A major trend in the past decade has been to globalize content digitally, especially for multimedia audiences. Translation is a two-step process. First, you input computer code, to prepare it to accept various locales. Every piece of content, whether natural language or non-language units, are arranged in a matrix, with each column representing a language and each row representing a phrase of a unit of meaning. Then each locale gets its own column in the database. And each user gets the content in the language suite to their location, either selected by the location of the device or the user’s selection.
How to Raise Revenue for Your Firm, Now
Translation services these days are rendered remotely. Translation takes place in the cloud. There used to be ways of interpreting face-to-face, especially in organizations like the UN, but the pandemic changed all that. What came instead is the process of conferencing online.
The pandemic taught us that there are health and economic benefits from staying home – if, of course, you find a way to work and profit from remote working. Now, a year after the pandemic hit, we’re still faced with the changes that have occured in the workplace: remote teams, online work, and communicating digitally.
The beauty is that other businesses are reaching the same epiphany, so you can set up meetings to promote or negotiate with far less hassle than was possible in the days of “meet for lunch”, “grab a coffee” and “have dinner after the conference.” You can still get the work done, more efficiently through many online tools.
Expanding Language Reach Is Key To Raising Profit
Even when we’re able to fly and go out as we once did, we have to market remotely. The challenge is marketing in unfamiliar languages. That’s where translating remotely comes in. Chances are that your website is in a singular language or two at most. But the big platforms offer a few dozen languages. Do they know something you don’t know?
The incremental cost of translation and adding a new locale is minuscule compared to creating original content. You’re reading this in English, so chances are that this is your preferred language. It’s the language of business, right? But the reality is that 1.26 billion people speak English, less than 1 in 6 humans. The second to fourth place language adds up to twice as many.
So if you have products or services with global demand, and the cost of adding language is trivial, why not use your time now to add languages and sell to locations that were beyond your reach? Expanding your reach to different global locations is key to raising profit. Affordable services are a click away.
Methods of Translation You Can Use, Now
Machine Translation
About five years ago there was a revolution in how computers did the translation. The software began using neural networks to improve translation quality. Today, all software uses neural networks for translation to match and sometimes exceed the quality of human translators. Services like Google Translate and Microsoft translator can do a decent job with the structured text, but they still are no match for human translation in creative and marketing texts. If you develop applications or websites, you can also buy software which provides management tools to add language to your sites and apps easily.
Freelance Translation
There are freelance marketplaces like Upwork and Freelance.com where you can find translators for more than 100 languages. Post your translation job and freelance translators will bid for your job. You can ask questions and negotiate the best rate. Or you can proactively search for translators yourself. The platform intermediates the deal, payments, and reporting. A tip is to hire a pair of translators, one to check the work of the other and to serve as a backup in case the other one flakes out. The average translation rate in the US is $0.22/word, but you can negotiate for less.
Power Combination of Human and Machine
If you have the budget, the safe way to go is via a professional company which provides a one-stop solution for all languages and all language-related services. They take upon themselves the management of linguistic talent, and they crack the whip to ensure delivery on time and on budget. You’ll pay roughly twice what freelancers charge, but you’ll gain accountability and peace of mind.
To get going, send a query to three to five agencies, summarizing your project and target languages. You should get a response, with a proposal and timetable, within hours. Take your pick among candidates based on price, speed, reputation, and the chemistry you feel.
Maintaining an online business is challenging, but since everyone’s online, you have a bigger audience. It’s more accessible, more streamlined, and reaches more people. Online or remotely, translation services are key to having your content be available everywhere.
