By John Adams
If you’re running a business or website, you might have created a range of content to engage, attract, and retain your audiences. This content could be any blog posts, newsletters, white papers, podcasts, social posts, videos, etc.
When it comes to content translation, you convert this content to another language. It happens when you try to implement a global content strategy. Previously, your content was aimed at local consumers. After translation, you try to achieve similar results in a new geographic market with users speaking a different language.
To leverage the power of content, written or spoken, the content translation process plays a critical role, however. Done right, it can open up a lot of new opportunities for your company in a foreign market. But if you don’t accurately approach translation, it leads you to massive missed opportunities
Significance of Content Translation
Content translation can be important for your global business for the same reasons you use content marketing. Your business makes use of content to build authority, trust, and credibility. With the help of content, you convince readers to visit your website. And it’s the same content that makes them decide whether to stay longer on your site or turn away.
So, if you look to expand your business on an international scale, content translation is extremely crucial for you. It will help your business travel across linguistic and cultural borders and engage customers that were previously out of your company’s reach.
For instance, if you can work with a partner providing professional German translation services, you can get in touch with roughly 155 million consumers that speak German. This is one example of how content translation can give your business a revenue-generating exposure.
Where Do I Begin with Content Translation?
Before you can get started with content translation, you need an appropriate strategy. Ask yourself why you need to enter an overseas market. What particular information do you already have about your new audience? What kind of format will serve their needs the most: written content or spoken materials like audio and video?
Successful companies integrate translation into their operations right from the beginning. Because the translation isn’t a simple task you can ask your junior marketing intern to complete it after launching the content.
Therefore, if you want to set your content translation project up for a successful start, you need to consider a few things.
Define Clear Goals and Objectives
Be clear about what success seems like to you. If you don’t know what you can hopefully achieve after content translation, it would be hard for you to eventually get there. Hence, establish a big-picture goal for your project. When setting goals, it’s equally important that you break down your goals into smaller objectives.
Specify who makes your target audience. Find out their interests. How and where they will find your valuable content. Do a market analysis to figure out the leading competitors and their strengths.
Identify key metrics to measure the performance of your content. Let’s say you translate your content into French by using French translation services. How would you measure whether or not it’s performing up to the mark?
Establish a Content Translation Process
Translating your content is one thing and making sure the right people do the job is another. Have you created any system that makes it clear for translators what needs to undergo translation? Okay, once the translation is done, how would your marketers get to know about its status? If your team includes designers, when will they have the content at their disposal? Last but not least, who will be in charge of putting all this into action?
So, before you start, it’s essential to get answers to all these questions. Also, make sure that all the stakeholders in your company are on the same page.
Conduct a Thorough Market Research
Researching your marketing inside and out can be very helpful to make your project a success. Your translated content won’t be effective if it doesn’t resonate with the cultural and regional preferences of users.
For example, your content was in English and you implemented certified Arabic translation services into your strategy. If you don’t know that most Arabic-speaking countries are Muslims with their own Islamic traditions, social norms, and culture, your translation can offend your target audience.
For this reason, experts suggest you should always opt for localization instead of translation alone. Because localization allows you to go beyond simple language conversion. It helps you include unique nuances of the target market in your translation.
Localization is also preferable because your multilingual content can also include website design, blog page layout, and other visual elements. Localization will adapt all these elements to best suit the individual preferences and needs of your target audience.
Implement International SEO
Search engine optimization (SEO for short) would be a clear choice to market your products and services in the home market. However, the same efforts may not yield good results as you try to sell abroad.
This is because you’re entering a new culture which is critical in defining how a user performs the search. This holds true even when users have the same mother tongue. For example, consumers in the United States of America would use “pants” to search for what consumers in the United Kingdom would call “trousers”. So, if you don’t localize your keywords for each target market, you might go viral but only for the wrong reasons.
Therefore, it’s vital that you do proper keyword research to get an idea of how people search the web to buy products like yours. Once you understand that, you can structure your words so that your business is easily found.
Final Remarks
Content translation is paramount if you need to be successful on a global stage. If you don’t know where to start with it, we’ve listed the top things in this blog.
Once you’ve made all the preparations, you can decide who will render the actual content into a new target language. Keep in mind that translation requires more than just bilingual proficiency. You’ll be moving in the right direction if you entrust your translation and localization project to an experienced agency.
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