You receive a campaign from your head office. The text has already been translated, so you should be able to get started immediately. However, the message sounds clunky, product names are not always correct, and the tone does not match the local market.
Before you can start publishing, another round of editing and rewriting is needed.
Does this sound familiar to your marketing team?
An international construction company with its head office in Germany approached ELAN with a similar problem. The company was using a standard translation tool for communication with its foreign branches, including Belgium.
The existing terminology lists had mainly been drawn up for product information. The context and guidelines needed for good marketing copy were missing. As a result, the translations failed to hit the mark for the local teams.
Small differences in the German source texts were also causing problems. For example, a term containing ‘ß’ was not always recognised when it was written as ‘ss’.
Less correction work starts with the root
When translations need to be adjusted time and again, it is worth looking at what causes this. Are clear language guidelines missing? Does the translation tool receive enough context? Or is a local copywriter needed to sharpen the message?
Depending on the issue, we can help you in various ways:
• Aligning terminology with your communication. Together, we define the preferred terms for products and marketing, with attention to local differences and spelling variants.
• Making the desired writing style concrete. Clear style guidelines and examples ensure that translators, tools, and local teams are all looking in the same direction.
• Setting up the translation process more effectively. We determine how target audience, text purpose and context can be included from the start and where checks are needed.
• Using language experts where needed. A local language expert can review a translation or creatively rework a campaign, depending on the text’s requirements.
Technology can also play a vital role in this. For the construction company, we suggested our AI platform ELAN Libren, because the company wanted to continue translating in-house while also needing more control over context and terminology. The right approach depends on your texts, way of working, and available people.
The goal: local marketing teams that lose less time on recurring corrections and can publish a message more quickly that is appropriate for their market.
Does your team need to rework translations on a regular basis?
Get in touch with Johan Noël. Together, we will look at the cause of the issues and how we can reduce the need for rewriting.
Email johannoel@elanlanguages.com or call +32 11 43 47 64.