BAD TRANSLATIONS VS. GOOD TRANSLATIONS
When it comes to communication, what proves effective in one country seldom yields the same results in another. To adapt texts internationally, whether for a corporate website, an e-commerce product page, a blog article, or a Facebook post, there are different practices, ranging from making verbatim translations or transcreations to crafting texts that are ‘wor(l)d-ready’.
Did you know that 62% of French e-tailers sell internationally (Baromètre Fevad/LSA/OpinionWay, March 2023)? This is encouraging news as it shows that companies use digital technologies to develop their business in the export markets. However, a closer look reveals that 86% of these international sales are directed to Belgium, indicating a preference for targeting French-speaking customers to skip translation challenges! Fortunately, with the recent AI technologies, everyone can access high-quality translations. This allows businesses to effectively reach potential customers in any international market without needing to master their language. In this article, we will see how to use these technologies, starting with the ones to … avoid.
BAD TRANSLATIONS
To better understand which translation techniques to avoid, let’s examine the following case study.
Case study
1001HOBBIES is a French e-commerce selling model kits of airplanes, vehicles, boats, cars, etc. The company offers its products internationally through six country-specific domains, 1001hobbies.fr, 1001hobbies.co.uk, 1001hobbies.de, 1001hobbies.es, 1001hobbies.it and 1001hobbies.nl, and one generic domain, 1001hobbies.com. This domain structure has seven specific SEO settings: one for France, one for the UK, one for Germany, one for Spain, one for Italy, one for the Netherlands, and one for the USA and the rest of the world.
One of its competitors, the English https://www.car-model-kit.com/, has taken a different approach with a single generic domain and the integration of a Google Translate widget that automatically translates the website into over 130 languages! While foreign internet users can easily understand the content in their language, this approach is not optimized for SEO. Indeed, the SEO on this website is unique because there is only one domain name, car-model-kit.com, and only one written language, English. So, even though the Google Translate widget can turn English into any other of the 130 and more languages “on-the-fly”, the written texts in the code of the website remain in English: if German texts are displayed on a website, for example, the crawling bots of google.de will only see English texts, and will not understand them. As a consequence, the website will not achieve a good ranking on google.de. And that is the same for all the other languages of the Google Translate widget. Whenever the translation is on the fly and not written in the code of a website, it is impossible for the website to rank well in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages). Only the written language, in this example English, can allow a website to rank well in the search engines that use that same language, like google.co.uk or google.com.
Why then translate the content of a website into more than 130 languages? This is a very good question since internet users in all the countries where these languages are spoken will not be able to find websites like car-model-kit.com in their local search engine. This approach can become interesting only if it is combined with advertising campaigns, like Google Ads, with substantial budgets to beat local competitors and, eventually, get into the SERP’s first few positions.
Are automatic translations bad?
As explained, offering internet users on-the-fly translations is not among the best techniques. But automatic translations are not always bad. Here is how to use them while minimizing Google’s penalties:
▪ Structure your site with URLs separated by language, whether with subdomains, subdirectories, or ccTLDs.
▪ Translate your pages with a machine translation service of your choice: for example, Google Translate, Deepl, ChatGPT, etc.
▪ Copy-paste the translations into the back-end of the pages of your site that are in the right language.
▪ Identify the language of your internet users via their device settings. Before redirecting them to the pages of your site in the corresponding language, ask them to confirm that this is what they want. For example, Amazon asks whether you want to use amazon.de or amazon.it if you are trying to connect to the German marketplace and it has detected that your browser is in Italian.
▪ Avoid automatically redirecting people to the language associated with their IP address because that is less precise especially when they are travelling.
▪ Provide the option to change the language with a specific switcher.
Translation VS Transcreation VS Wor(l)d-ready texts
In an e-export environment, it is essential to create content that is understood by your target audience. But that requires clever skills and understanding that the good performance of a publication in your country might not obtain the same results in other countries with a simple translation. It rarely goes that way. A simple translation will hardly be able to convey the same message abroad! Without adapting the message to the local culture, which may be completely different from the original one, the content or the call-to-action will not generate the same results. Simply, convincing the target foreign prospects to click and engage with the brand does not follow the same path.
This adaptation requires intercultural creativity, which is the notion of ‘transcreation’, the fusion of the two words ‘translation’ and ‘creation’, otherwise known as ‘creative translation’. It is a method that aims to retain the creative essence of a message while adapting it for a foreign audience. In transcreation, the element of creativity is therefore fundamental. To stress the difference between transcreation and translation, you can think that translation provides text while transcreation provides meaning.
Tips
Transcreation is a full-time job. But if you want to try it, here are some suggestions:
1.
You must first validate the target and the source, i.e., the original text with its tone and style.
2.
Then you must adapt the original message to the cultural context of the foreign country:
• Rule out all ‘false friends’ and elements that may evoke emotions contrary to those sought. • Turn features into benefits based on the local customer needs.
• Formulate creative ideas using metaphors, synonyms, antonyms, jokes, etc., respecting the cultural codes of the original text and the target country.
• Select the creative ideas that have the most emotional impact in the target country.
3.
There are cases where a good translation suffices, such as for impersonal technical texts. But as soon as the communication strategy involves emotional messages, transcreation is the only solution.
Whether accurate translations or transcreation, the content can be optimized during the development of the website, well before the international project begins. The aim is to create this content with the ‘wor(l)d-ready’ approach, which consists of editorial and graphic rules adapted to the foreign markets:
▪ Use a synthetic editorial style, with short sentences and paragraphs: one concept per sentence following a logical order.
▪ Use the tone that your customers use.
▪ Avoid passive voice, jargon, colloquial language, and cultural references.
▪ For short texts, such as slogans and baselines, the message must be expressed succinctly and often in only one language, with English remaining the preferred language: for example, Nokia’s ‘Connecting People’, Nike’s ‘Just Do It’, Nespresso’s ‘What else?’, and so on.
▪ Wor(l)d-ready websites must also consider the differences in text length between languages, because that can greatly influence the graphic result of the website, as you can see in the next figure.
Internet connects machines; languages connect people!
Geographical distances have been reduced tremendously thanks to the internet and other digital means of communication. Yet, planet earth is a huge territory where cultural differences can also be huge. Let’s consider the distribution of the world’s population by continent. It is easy to see that more than half of the world’s population lives in Asia, mainly in China and India, the two most populated countries in the world. But the most interesting thing in this figure is to associate it with the business context of, say, a German company that is successfully exporting to North America and achieving 30% market share in that region. It means that this company reaches 30% of 5% = 1.67% of the global market! Though a positive result, it is missing 98.33% of opportunities in the rest of the world.
Being successful in a foreign country requires cultural closeness and effective communication. Mastering exonyms and endonyms30, knowing the local culture, and fully understanding the original message to convey are extremely key in today’s connected world. Although translators can understand the literal meaning of words and the accuracy of the terminology used, they might lack creativity and marketing skills to write compelling texts adapted to foreign cultural nuances. A full adaptation to a country’s linguistic subtleties requires a mix of marketing skills, writing talent, technical understanding, knowledge of the local culture, and, of course, fluency in the local language.
With about 7,000 different languages on earth, the cultural complexity we can face in a foreign country can be very high. Digital can certainly help, but before that there is another consideration that comes into play. Let’s take the above figure and the world internet penetration rate of 53.6%31. Among these 53 people out of 100 that have internet access:
▪ 7 speak Chinese as a native language
▪ 4 Spanish
▪ 4 Hindi or Bengali
▪ 3 English
▪ 2 Portuguese
▪ 1 Russian
▪ 1 Japanese
▪ 1 Turkish
▪ 1 French
▪ 1 German
▪ 28 other languages
In this heterogeneous linguistic context, a company must choose the languages that are really important for its business. The focus should be on quality and not quantity: it is useless to translate a website into thirty languages if the products or services have interesting sales potential in only three countries. The majority of international companies translate their websites into fewer than ten languages, and in Europe, for example, five languages33 cover almost 80% of the European market.
How much does it cost?
There are different solutions for managing a multilingual website, ranging from large language service providers to cloud platforms for working directly with freelance translators: SDL, MemoQ, Lokalise, Smartling, Transifex, SmartCat, LingoHub, Eazylang, Ubiqus, DeepL, etc. The cost varies widely, from free to €0.007 per word for automatic AI translations and to €0.3 or higher per word for human translations depending on the amount of text, the complexity of the content (if it is a website or software as a service (SaaS), for example), the complexity of the language (it is easier and cheaper to translate from French to Italian than from Bengali to German, for example), and the deadline.
For a 30,000-word English website, of which 20,000 words are repeated, the number of words to be used to calculate the translation cost will be 10,000. For translating that from English to German within a standard timeframe, the average cost for a human translation is around €0.15 per word, so the total cost would around €1,500. Another option can be to use AI automatic translation, which costs about €0.007 per word. This system does not deduct the repeated words; therefore, the final cost must be calculated on the total amount of words: 30,000 x €0.007 = €210. The final cost in case of human translations can also depend on other factors, such as the negotiation with the translator or translation agency, which is one of the most important. In general, the cost mentioned above is cheaper for Latin languages such as Spanish, French or Italian, and more expensive for Japanese, Chinese or Russian.
But, before launching a translation project and the cost for it, you need to:
▪ Optimize the content to be translated according to the objectives that the website must achieve in the target foreign country: the text can be reduced to the essential; the useless pages can be deleted; some separate miniwebsites can be created; an optimized domain structure must be set up.
▪ Select the languages that are really needed for your export project.
▪ Prioritize the order of translations according to the potential of your export target countries: it is not necessary to do all the translations at once, you can also proceed gradually.