3 Practical Tips to Avoid Translation Errors in Marketing

When it comes to having a localisation marketing strategy, companies have often downplayed the need to develop careful plans to tap into a new market. Fortunately, in today’s business landscape, most organisations recognise that entering a new market raises a unique set of challenges. And, that translation errors can be a huge drawback.

This unique set of challenges implies that, if they aren’t addressed in the right way, provide results that are far from satisfactory. Or, worse, that can make you question “Why did I do this?!”—and leave you without a single answer and more than one headache.

The good thing is that experience is a great teacher. And it’s not always your own experience that counts; sometimes it’s about seeing what someone else did to know where to set your course or to completely depart from that ship.

That’s why, in this article, we’ll analyse the fundamentals to learn how to engage with new audiences and go through a list of handy tips to ensure the success of your marketing copy. Plus, we’ll review a few examples. Ready to go?

Know Your Brand First To Better Connect With Your Audience Later

Before we dive headlong into tips for preventing translation errors, let’s take a moment to consider the next statement. To engage with others, you need to know your traits first!

In our lives, connecting with like-minded people with something valuable to share or common interests, nurtures us.  But to find those people, we first need to know ourselves a bit. What we enjoy, what we don’t, our motivations, what we do and why, etc. The answers to these questions, which generally take place unconsciously, lead us to the people with whom we can be a good match.

And the same goes for your business proposal. You don’t want to connect with just anyone, as if you were throwing friend requests in the air. What you want is to engage with the right people at the right time.

Therefore, it’s essential to have a solid understanding of these four key aspects:

• Who you are: Identifying and communicating your business identity effectively is the first step towards connecting with your audience on a deeper level.
• What you do: Clearly conveying your products, services, and offering proposal will help your audience grasp the benefits you bring to the table.
• When and where you do it: Understanding the specific context in which you operate, including timing and location, enables you to tailor your marketing efforts accordingly.
• Why you are doing it: Sharing your brand’s mission, values, and purpose behind what you do adds authenticity and builds trust with your audience.

Once you have a firm grasp on these elements, you can start planning your localisation marketing strategy. But, how can you localise to increase conversions and drive sales across the globe while ensuring there are no translation errors to lament? Just keep scrolling.

How to Avoid Marketing Translation Errors

When you adapt your communications to fit a specific culture, language style, and preferences, it’s easy to understand why your chances of properly communicating with your audience will soar. However, a wide variety of costly marketing translation errors have taught us that choosing not to localise your content isn’t a wise option. 

#1 Conduct Market Research

When it comes to digital marketing translation, you can’t simply copy and paste translated marketing campaigns. You must perform extensive research on your new target market, the language, and the customs. Failing to do so can make the message you’re trying to transmit incoherent or, as KFC famously found out, completely inappropriate. One of the biggest marketing translation errors meant that KFC’s slogan, “Finger-lickin’ good,” was translated as “You’ll eat your fingers off” in Mandarin. While this may sound funny in retrospect, it certainly does little to boost a business’ credibility (or sales opportunities) when targeting a new customer base. 

A localisation marketing strategy entails more than just delivering the right message. Sometimes it can mean changing the distribution channel completely. For example, you may use Facebook to promote your content. But you would not use it when targeting the Chinese market—Facebook is banned in most of the country. Instead, WeChat will be the best option to engage with your audience.

Even if you choose to target English-speaking countries like the US and the UK, localisation will play a huge role. Things like the spelling of certain words, the measurement system, and date formatting (DD/MM/YYYY or MM/DD/YYYY) will change from one country to another. 

#OptimationalTip: When developing a localisation marketing strategy, make sure that the message you’re trying to transmit and the channel you’re using match the targeted audience. And when in doubt, do research!

#2 Localise, Not Just Translate

Localisation is much more than translation. When targeting a new market, work with a marketing translation agency or localisation experts that know your targeted audience’s language, culture, and behaviours. This can be a game-changer. It’s important to work with local experts, as they’ll know how to address your audience.

You shouldn’t only rely on machine translation, especially for marketing content. This is because marketing content often has very specific goals and uses rhetorical devices, such as idioms. These idiomatic phrases can be very difficult to translate, and they make no sense when translated literally. For example, in English “bread and butter” is used to refer to someone’s basic living (“That’s how he earns his bread and butter”.) However, in Spanish, the metaphor—as such —doesn’t exist.

Additionally, tone can also be tricky, as certain cultures respond better to a specific way of speaking than others. For example, the same message may be delivered with a more aggressive, sales tone for the US than it would for Europe. Even when the desired outcome is the same. 

When working with a marketing translation agency, don’t just share the source text. Let them know the message you’re trying to convey, your goals, ideas, and research findings. By sharing these concepts with your language partner, you improve their ability to efficiently recreate them into the target language in a way that makes sense both linguistically and culturally.

#OptimationalTip: All this doesn’t mean that machine translation isn’t useful. If combined with professional MTPE it can be a good starting point, especially for other types of content.

#3 Remember Who You Are Talking To: Focus on Cultural Awareness

You’re marketing to humans, and humans understand emotions. Work with your team to develop campaigns that touch the heart of your consumers. To do this, you should understand the market you are tapping into. Additionally, analyse what drives your consumers into doing something and how they talk about those triggers. Likewise, understanding what can stir up negative emotions—that could hurt your sales—is essential to prevent this from happening. This means understanding local sensitivities and which issues may be particularly delicate in a specific area or with a specific audience.

Pepsi’s controversial ad with Kendall Jenner was a clear example of how a lack of cultural awareness can bring immense backlash to a brand. Essentially, any marketing campaign that isn’t sensitive to specific cultural matters flies non-stop to its doom.

It’s key to conducting a cultural review. One that flags content that may be construed as offensive and adapts imagery or design elements. This may be what saves a brand from offending its customer base.

In Summary: Avoiding Translation Errors Is a Must-Take Challenge

In our global world, business happens quickly, and even multicultural teams may not have a nuanced understanding of cultural mishaps. We all know that cross-cultural communication isn’t easy and adding language barriers to the mix makes everything even trickier. However, a poll by Harris Interactive found that 35% of consumers won’t buy from a company that releases an offensive ad. The same globalisation that allows companies to access new markets is what enables consumers to easily change where they shop. In short, choosing not to localise your marketing campaign may save you money—but it’ll also make you lose customers.

If you need help with your localisation marketing strategy, contact us. Let’s find out how our solutions can help your business grow.