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If you are developing a marketing strategy to sell your product in a foreign country, you are probably asking yourself one or more of the following questions: 1. Can I just translate my original marketing campaigns and use them abroad? You’ve probably guessed the answer to this one: it depends. If your marketing campaign does not contain culture- or language-specific elements, you can just have it translated. But if there are any elements — words, phrases, symbols, images, colours — that will be interpreted differently in your target country from how they are in your own, then localization is what you need. A good translation company will be able to tell you if you need to translate a marketing campaign or adapt it to a specific country.

If your clients belong to different language groups, it’s essential you have a multilingual website. This doesn’t mean including different languages in the same website, but having different versions of that website, each one in one language.

When taking your brand abroad, good marketing translation is crucial. Your videos, ads, email campaigns and webpages are what will get your brand image across to your foreign prospects — and either turn them into clients, or lose their interest.

If you are creating videos in order to attract new prospects and expand your products’ reach, you should probably be subtitling them. There are several reasons for this. One, it’s good SEO practice. Search engines will be able to index your videos much more efficiently if they know exactly what’s being said in them. So when you add subtitles to your videos, you are helping your audience find them.

Even if your ecommerce business is going well, that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for improvement. Here are five ideas of ways you can take it from good to better. 1. Invest in quality website content Your website is your storefront, your shop window and your calling card. You want it to look its best at all times. Quality content can make the difference between a completed sale and a page abandonment. And you probably know this from your own experience as an online shopper. You access the page, the product looks like it’s what you want, but you don’t buy it — because there’s only one product photo, or the photos cannot be zoomed in, or the product description is faulty.

At first, you may think that translating humour is too difficult, if not impossible. And you are almost right. Translating humour does demand careful and creative work, and there are cases when you simply can’t do it.  But even in these cases, you can often still create humorous material — text, sound, images, video — inspired by the original. You’re not exactly translating the joke, you’re transcreating it. 

The word “transcreation” is an amalgam of “translation” and “creation”. It means recreating a word or sentence in another language. If you want to expand your business abroad, you will have to translate most of your written content into the language of your new target audience. Your website, product packages, labels, instructions, maybe even the names of some of your products.  And sometimes, just an ordinary translation is enough. In the case of an instruction manual for instance, all you need are those same instructions, but in the new language. The same applies to the product descriptions on your website. In both cases, a good translation will do the job.

Advertising translation, marketing translation, or ad translation, is just that — it means translating ads, be they video, audio, static images or text. Simple, right?  Actually, it’s not. Because there’s a lot more to ad translation than just converting the words from one language to another. An advertisement is composed of many elements besides the verbal ones, and all of them must be redirected to target your foreign audience.

Audiovisual translation — also known as multimedia translation — is the translation of the verbal elements in media, which besides language include image and sound, or both. Translating the lyrics of a song, the words on a slideshow, or the narration in a product demo video, are all examples of multimedia translation. Where the original material includes both image and sound, the most common modes of multimedia translation are dubbing and subtitling. Both sounds rather simple, but translation is rarely simple, and audiovisual translation is no exception.