Translation as a Competitive Advantage

Marketing 101 tells us that the language you use to touch prospects should be clear and to the point, and compel them to act on your offer. These requirements don’t change when you’re marketing outside your own country.

Whether your company translates Web sites, marketing materials or owner’s manuals for international markets, the information should be readily comprehensible. That means it should be grammatically correct, spell-checked, unambiguous and fluent. It should be tailored to local cultural mores, expectations, business practices and laws. Looking at the question of international marketing more broadly, product names shouldn’t send adults giggling into the sunset like Barf detergent from Iran or HyperSTD from Germany.

That’s merely the ante. What if you really want to excel? Let’s ratchet up the translation requirement to what consumers really expect in their interactions with you on the Web—they want an experience that answers their questions, meets their needs and keeps them coming back. This demand for more quality goes beyond customers to business partners in your supply chain and employees inside your company. You don’t want to waste anyone’s time, and you know that everyone has a wealth of alternative choices online.

The experience that you offer customers—and the products that you want to sell—should look, taste and feel like they were created for that market, in the local language. Some product categories require less local feel, others more. It depends on the product.

In short, nothing should prevent the international reader from understanding what you want to communicate. Rather, if you do it right, language could be a competitive advantage as you enter new markets. How does this affect you as a marketing executive? You need to budget both time and money into every market launch to make sure that rhetorically effective translations show up for each market in time for product introductions and Web site refreshes.

This fluency comes at a cost, so you need to budget for this base level of accuracy and marketing effectiveness at your website, and in supporting material like marketing broadsheets, product catalogues online and offline, technical manuals and in any operational procedures that you publish. You won’t be alone in this multilingual communication challenge. Your colleagues who manage your supply chain, procurement, and internal applications like human resources face the same requirements as your business expands internationally or targets domestic communities such as Latinos in the United States or Poles in Ireland. Learn from their experiences, employ the tools and suppliers they may be using, and pool your budgets wherever you can for more buying leverage.

If you’re like most business managers, you don’t think about translation or market adaptation very much because it’s something that “just sort of happens” in response to a decision to enter a market. When the CEO or the board says that you’ll enter these 10 countries this year, somebody gets delegated to make that happen. This person will typically outsource the work to external agencies that provide a variety of language services such as translation, desktop publishing, Web site process management and adaptation to local business practices.

Some companies have their translation work done in a black-box sort of way, with little internal review. Smarter firms involve reviewers all along the content life cycle to make sure that the translated information is accurate and on brand. Your job is to make sure that this more informed review happens. After all, it’s only your brand that is at stake.

How big a job is this? Place yourself on the other side of the linguistic divide. Visit sites aimed at the U.S. market by firms in Germany, Japan and even England. Learn about the companies and what they offer. Only by putting yourself in the shoes of a foreign consumer can you truly understand what your prospects will expect of your site.

Don DePalma is the founder and chief research officer of the research and consulting firm Common Sense Advisory, and author of the premier book on business globalization “Business Without Borders: A Strategic Guide to Global Marketing.”