HOW TO SAVE MONEY AND WIN BUSINESS ON MULTILINGUAL WEB CONTENT

1) AVOID machine translations unless you have them edited by a competent (bilingual) professional before publication

Machine translations (whether free online resources or software packages you have acquired) can be helpful if you just need to understand the gist of a message in a foreign language. However good they may be, they cannot compute all the variables involved in the selection of the appropriate expressions for a particular context, let alone for your unique company culture, so it pays to avoid the temptation to use them to translate into a foreign language. If you do, it is wise to have them proofread by a professional. WARNING – proofreading is normally charged on a time-basis. If the translation you provide is poor, you may end up paying more than you would normally have if you had had the linguist carry out the translation in the first place.

2) LOOK FOR professionals

No matter how well-intentioned some efforts may be, we continuously come across poor translation, which at best will make us smile and at worst, can cause serious harm and/or damages.

3) INFORM the professional linguists

The more information you supply, the better end product. You may have your own company glossary from a past campaign, or you may want to reach a particular target audience. Relevant additional information will help you achieve your goals.

4) LIFE AFTER THE TRANSLATION

Once you have received your translated web content, it might need to be formatted (if you haven’t provided files that allow overtyping so that you get the translation ready) and uploaded. Sadly, many little things can fail at this stage. An involuntary deletion of part of a hidden code or the corruption of foreign characters may result in a poorly-looking site; the pages may not be linked properly… It would take an experienced professional just a few minutes to spot any such problems. When at last you got your site published, and you got it nicely ranked in search engine hits, you start getting enquiries in the foreign language! NO PROBLEM. You don’t need to hire in-house multilingual employees from now on. You can always go back to the professionals and pay only for the work they carry out. Speak to them. You may be pleased to find they can even arrange to handle telephone calls in their particular language. Imagine how impressed your (prospective) customers or clients will be if they can discuss their needs in their own language. The linguists need not resolve the queries but they will endeavour to win the business for you. You will receive the queries in English and you can instruct the linguist to reply in the foreign language as necessary. In the case of telephone work, you will usually be charged on a time-basis. In the case of translation, expect to be charged on a word-count basis.

I will be thrilled to help you communicate and deal

with the vast Spanish-speaking world!