Hiring A Good Translation Service

With global markets for goods and services expanding at a dizzying pace, the demand for language translation and website localization services is experiencing a growth in tandem. According to current estimates the market size is put at $13 billion. Unlike the situation in past decades, there is an orientation towards specialization, even in the business of language translation services. Mere knowledge of the source and target languages backed by a professional certificate of translation will no longer suffice for the highly complex nature of international business deals and transactions.

Specialization in translation services

Translators are called upon to render financial, medical, technical, business and legal documents in the target language. More often than not, a linguistic expert does not possess the required level of expertise in these fields, each of which has its own specialized lexicon and usage of terms. Translation professionals need to be competent in their language pairs, and must also be willing to take extra efforts to research the subject well and to use the appropriate terms and phrases that suit the occasion in the exact manner they were intended in the original document.

Need for localization services

Businesses anticipating to launch and sell their products with success in international markets, find that it becomes essential to localize them, or to accommodate their brochures and other materials for promotion as well as the products themselves, to the language and particular forms of expression, ethnic habits, and circumstances of the local markets, while also staying in line with the local statute law.

Another factor to be considered is that the legal framework differs from one country or region to another. The usage of phrases and the meaning they convey are quite at variance as we travel across the globe. This is where localization, or adaptation to local usage, comes in. Today translation services firms also offer promotional materials, documents or website localization services as part of their service portfolio.

Instances are not wanting where companies and even governmental departments have run into difficulties because they did not localize their documents. The following are a few amusing incidents, which were by no means amusing to those at the receiving end!

Electrolux launched its Vacuum cleaners in the USA with the following ad campaign: "Nothing sucks like an Electrolux."
The Pepsi slogan "Come alive with the Pepsi Generation", in its Taiwanese translation read as "Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead."
Kentucky Fried Chicken's "finger-lick'n good" got translated to Chinese as "eat your fingers off."
Of course, these translation mistakes proved to be quite costly to the manufacturers. So the importance of localization particularly when business is conducted across geographical boundaries cannot be overstressed.

In conclusion, as businesses target clients are from different cultural and language areas, often there will be a lack of response to marketing efforts from targeted audiences, who will not even find good usage to the products supplied unless they have been localized to fit their particular needs. So it is important to allow for supporting information in a language they can understand, and in a way in tune with the local commercial surroundings and practices.