Why Translation Quality Impacts Your Business

Whatever product or service you offer your customers, the most important thing is its quality. You don’t want to waste money on poor quality, and neither does anyone else. This is true when you do business abroad as well as at home.

There’s a catch, though. Your product has to be good — but it must also be perceived as good by your target audience. Which is not the same thing. And not only that, but the process of buying it must also impact your client positively.

Together, these two aspects compose what is called “customer experience”. Hubspot defines customer experience as “the impression your customers have of your brand as a whole throughout all aspects of the buyer's journey”.

This is why when you do business abroad you must pay attention to more than your product quality. You must ensure that all text is well translated, so that the buying process happens flawlessly in the foreign language. 

After all, when you want to buy something on a website and you see spelling mistakes and wrong adjectives in the product descriptions, don’t you immediately lose confidence? You naturally think that, if they did not bother to write things correctly and help you find what you are looking for, they probably didn’t bother to create a good product either.

It’s also true that if the text is flawless, and you can easily find what you are looking for, your customer experience is positive and you feel confident that so will the product be.

As a businessperson, the last thing you want to do is what Amazon did in Sweden — launching an error-ridden website where product descriptions include obscene words, and the Argentinian flag was mistaken for that of Sweden.

Practical Advantages of Good Translation

• Your foreign-language website will attract more prospects if it’s optimized for search engines. Good website translation takes into account not only what words are correct, but also what words are most used by people searching for your products.

• There is a much higher chance of prospects turning into clients when they navigate your website if they can easily find what they are looking for. This happens when all the words are correctly translated and spelled.

• Clients who receive correctly written or translated material (labels, written or video instructions, warranties etc.) will be more likely to buy from you again than those who have trouble assembling or using equipment.

• By ensuring all descriptions, instructions and documents are correctly translated, you avoid legal processes for misleading information, additional costs for returned products or reimbursed services, and time and resources spent on damage control.

In some cases, good translation starts even further up — it starts with your brand name.

Because a name which sounds great in your home country may be meaningless in another country — or worse, it can have ridiculous or offensive associations.

In China for instance, where local languages are many (and all of them, radically different from Western languages) many brands choose to translate their names. Coca-Cola did it, and so did many others, for excellent reasons.

All the above comes to prove that if you are going global, translation is something you definitely don’t want to leave to chance. Working with a team of expert translators and localizers will have a huge positive impact on your business abroad.