Marketing Translation Services

Oct 19th, 2013

Marketing Translation Services

Marketing translation is the translation of marketing material.

As you know marketing material is not only supposed to convey a message but also to persuade the reader. Therefore, marketing translations are particularly challenging because they need a higher level of creativity compared to technical or medical translation.

Marketing is divided into two main categories: offline and online marketing.

Offline marketing is basically paper advertisement and TV advertisement, but also includes all the collateral that goes with the promotion of a company (leaflets, presentation, even business cards)

Online marketing is all the content that lives online. The field of online marketing is so broad to include Content Marketing, online advertisement (PPC campaigns and banners creation), SEO and email marketing just to name the main categories.

Another case is when we have to translate material such as books, researches or presentations speaking about marketing. This is a whole new problem: since marketing is a technical field where terms are originally created in English this means that often there is no exact equivalent in other languages. About the problem of non-equivalences I wrote a specific blog post.

 

When we speak about offline marketing material then the first challenge is localizing the text in order to create the same reactions in the reader. Note that in this case the target text could become completely different from the original. The second challenge is that we have to make make the text fit a physical space: the leaflet, the business card, or the 2 lines advertisement that have to appear on a newspaper.

 

With online marketing on the other hand (that is more and more requested) we are dealing with websites, online advertisement campaigns or emails. As I wrote in the article about how people read webpages, people read online material in a different way than they read offline. When we are online we skim-read: we read the few words that catch our attention, we tend to spend more times on the first and second lines of the pages and on the right side, since our eyes go from left to right. All these rules are extremely important when translating a website or an email.

Translating PPC campaign is even more challenging. Here we have to translate a text that has to catch the reader’s attention in 2 lines, nothing more than a handful of characters.

Some of the articles about marketing that you can find on this blog:

Marketing, PR and Corporate Translation – Interview with Nicole Adams

Localization and SEO

Translators, Self Marketing And Social Media

How Users Read Web Pages (Or Don’t)

 

Or simply visit the full list of the articles about Marketing Translation.

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