What's the Value of a Translation Company?
Marketing in today's online market is a global game. Even if your business started out small and local, the ticket to expansive growth is by creating copy for all demographics that are interested in your brand. Often, the range of your audience may span many languages, countries, and continents. To speak to all members of your audience and ensure that your message gets across clearly and your brand and mission is well-received you need a global translation company.
A translation company knits together your message or copy into the fabric of every culture and country, whether your customer is reading your blog on their notebook from a café in Paris's La Marais district to a backpacker checking your gaming app on their smartphone traveling by rail in Norway.
This FAQ is designed to answer your basic questions about translation companies and is intended to help give you what you need before making the decision to hire translation services.
1) What is a translation company?
As it sounds, a translation company provides professional translation services that can take your message or a piece of copy written in your tongue and create new or variations of text in as many different languages as you'd like. With a quality translation company, you should be able to see the translated copy written in your own language or the language of your choice in such an accurate way as to pass the native speaker test. This test ensures naturalness in language choice and syntax to make the translation seamless.
Translation companies also often offer localisation services, which takes an existing product or piece of copy and adapts it to the language and culture of the targeted locale where it will be sold or consumed. That means that if you have a blog article or product and want it sold in a different country or region, aglobal translation company can adjust the marketing, language, and UX (user experience) to fit that of the new locale.
2. Why choose a translation agency?
Hiring a translator from Fiverr or finding a freelance translator who can give you a bargain may not yield the results you are after. The best translations read as though someone in that language is speaking their native language and the meaning or message is not watered down in poorly transcribed syntax and lexical cognates. Especially when you're trying to generate content to gain traffic and establish your company as an authority in your industry on the search engines, you need accurate and engaging copy across the board. (Note: Google will ding you and reduce your ranking if your content is not accurate, feels fabricated, or appears to be "stuffed" with key words or is poorly rendered).
For a seamless translation and masterful marketing practices, you want a multilingual translation agency that is comprised of a knowledgeable team, packed with project managers, tested linguists, and proofreaders that can ensure your copy not only aces the native speaker test, but also meets the stringent standards search engines like Google place on rank-worthy content.
3. Why shouldn't I just use Google Translation?
Google Translation is great for readers who land on a page written in a
foreign language and want to understand what they're reading, but it's not ideal for companies like yourself to use as the final say in creating multilingual pages for SEO purposes.
The truth is that even with technological advances, Google still isn't able to match the fluidity required to emulate a human-produced translation. There's no substitute for a team of experts crafting and translating your message for the world.
Services like Google also do not take into consideration local and regional variations among dialects, which is required for proper localisation services.
4. Do I need a proofreader?
Proofreading will always be invaluable and we will always strongly encourage it. Even editors, writers, and translators make errors; a proof-reader drags a fine-tooth comb over your copy to ensure that no comma, hyphen, or modifier is out of place. Proofreading is the polish that allows good copy to become shining, beautiful copy that gleams off the page. Opting for this service is always more than worth the price.
