Translate Your Amazon Listings – Why To Hire Professional Translators To Do It

Translate Your Amazon Listings

When you start thinking about listing your products on Amazon, it seems to be a task as easy as pie.

This however, is not the case if you have hundreds of products to sell. It gets even harder when you want to expand those products to different Amazon marketplaces. That requires in fact that you translate your Amazon listings.

A quick research on Amazon Germany shows that there are sellers, sometimes “big names’”, having their listings in English, including the products’ titles and descriptions. Is this the way successful businesses work? Certainly not. Have you ever been to a shoe shop in Germany, Spain or France where everything is written in English? I certainly haven’t. Businesses know that if they want to sell, they need to speak the language of their customers. This is true for both online and offline businesses.

If a business that sells products online wants to be successful, it has to translate its marketing material, its products descriptions, the instruction manual and pretty much everything that customers will read.

This requires hiring skilled translators to translate this material, including their Amazon listings. The translator will have to translate things like the titles and descriptions of the products in the language of the market that the business is targeting. As we all know translators are not just translating words, but also meanings and cultural expressions. They use their linguistic and cultural knowledge to transmit something from the source to the target language. This is not just a favour that businesses do to their customers; it will also help to sell more, because customers will understand the products better and feel more confident in buying. 

But what are the elements of Amazon listings?

The elements of Amazon listings

If you log in to your Amazon Seller Central at sellercentral.amazon.com you’ll see that Amazon recommends vendors to provide:

• 1. Product title
• 2. Product description
• 3. browse nodes (Amazon product categories in which an item should be listed)
• 4. bullet points (that give succinct information about the products)
• 5. search terms (keywords buyers might use to search for an item).

Let’s take a real listing as an example:

Product Title

The product title in this example is “SnoozeShade Original Universal Baby Sunshade (blocks 99% UV)”

This will typically be translated as it is. If it contains a brand name, this obviously will not be translated, but the product name itself will require almost a word-for-word translation. There are cases where the word-for-word translation doesn’t work, because for example there is no equivalent object in the target language. In those cases you can use one of these translation techniques, such as chunking up or chunking down.

Product description

In our example the product description is not visible. In fact, if you want to see the product description you’d have to click on “see more product details” and that link will then bring you to the product description, which is actually at the bottom of the page. This is what it looks like:

The product description is where the translator can have his/her talent shine. They need to give a full, rounded description of the product itself, using the original version as a guideline but really focusing on the target audience. Here is where, as a business owner, you should not care about a word-for-word translation, but rather have your translator do her magic and simply create a cultural adaptation of what you originally wrote.

Browse Nodes

The Browse Nodes are Amazon’s product categories in which an item should be listed. In this blog post you’ll find an amazing explanation of the “Browse tree guide”. You’ll learn why it’s important to put your product in the right category so that people can find it easily, and why it’s important that when you list your products in other marketplaces you take into account what different browse nodes you want to list it under.

Bullet Points

Bullet points are particularly important because it’s one of the first elements clients see. In this example you can see the bullet points on the right.

Even without scrolling further, the client can read these 5 bullet points straight away. To read the product description, on the other hand, the client must actually click on the hyperlink at the end of the 5 bullet points, that reads “See more products details”. This will bring her at the bottom of the page, where the product description is. Not every client will read the product description, but everyone will read the 5 bullet points. You understand now why the accurate translation of this 5 bullet points is even more important than the product description itself.

Search terms

Search terms are those keywords that people type in the search box in order to find what they’re looking for. Pretty much like you would do in Google Adwords, you need to specify what keywords you want that specific product to rank for. Again, it’s not just a matter of translating the keywords you’ve used for the Amazon.co.uk into German to guarantee that your product will be found in the German Amazon marketplace. The translation might be accurate, but perhaps Germans don’t refer to that object the same way Brits do, who knows..

The best way to find out what keywords are most suitable in another Amazon marketplace is not to simply translate the original one, but to do some research to optimize the keywords in the target language.

The correct and accurate translation of all these elements will make an item much more likely to be found and eventually sold than in the case of not doing this. Focus has to be given on the target buyers.

The person providing all these information on the site, needs to be able to “enter” the buyer’s mind and understand their needs and thoughts. He or she should know which keywords a German speaker, for instance, would use to search for a specific item and in which product category someone would most likely search for it.

Before translating the listing, the translator must know who the target client is. In this article about Amazon copywriting tips, the first tip is actually to know your target audience. This is true both for the person who write the original copy and for the translator.

Moreover, Amazon makes it possible for sellers to list an item found in many variations, in various colours for instance, under a single listing. Buyers then see the picture of one item and when they click on it they can see all its different variations. Thus, this first picture customers see is crucial, as it determines the purchaser’s choice to have a look at the product or not.

A translator’s ability to mediate culture will make it possible to choose the most appropriate picture for the listing. A merchandiser selling bags for teenagers in Germany and the UK for instance, should know which colours teenagers in Germany prefer and which colours are preferred by young people in the UK, in order to use the most suitable image.

Thus, translation needs knowledge of culture, apart from linguistic knowledge. In order to sell you need to know your customer’s language and culture. By choosing a skilled translator who is also experienced in translating Amazon listings businesses have much better chances of success.