Unsurprising then, World Marketing Day every 27th May continues gathering momentum.

But here’s the thing. Even the most dazzling campaign falls flat if it doesn’t speak your audience’s language and literally gets lost in translation.

Enter marketing translation services.

What Makes Marketing Translation Services the Secret Weapon Leading Marketers Swear By?

 Behind every successful global brand is a brilliant translator making sure your marketing messages don’t mean something laughably unfortunate in another language. Yes, this happens, more than you’d think.

For this reason, professional language services are the engine room of global marketing for the following good reasons:

• Clarity out of confusion – The wrong word choice can kill a campaign. But expert marketing translation services ensure your message attracts rather than repels.

• Cultural nuance is everything – Humour, tone, and idioms vary wildly across languages. That killer joke your UK team adores might raise eyebrows in Beijing or Berlin.

• It’s not just what you say – It’s how, when, where, and to whom you say it. Context is key. Language professionals understand this better than anyone.

So, what sort of business uses professional language services for surety everybody’s speaking the same language?

What Products or Services Can You Translate? (Spoiler: Pretty Much Everything)

If your audience sees or hears it, it deserves to be said perfectly in their language. So don’t think about language services in terms of sector specificity, but more for things like:

• Ad campaigns
• Social media content
• Website copy
• Email marketing
• Packaging
• Exhibition stands and associated comms

Speak Their Language, Win Their Business

 At la Academia, we get how marketing is about understanding people, their psychology, their culture, their world.

Accordingly, our marketing translation services make this possible across borders.

As Medichecks Marketing Manager Cerys Gardiner told the CIM (Chartered Institute of Marketing) in her recent article International Day of Marketing: Why it’s time to #CelebrateMarketing: “…if you’ve ever built a great campaign, introduced a content idea that people loved, or even helped a customer find the right solution for them, you’ve made a difference. And that’s something worth celebrating”.

Get in touch if you’re dreaming of success of non-English speaking countries.

Our ‘In The Staffroom’ series of articles has been introducing you to some of the wonderful people who help make La Academia such a great place to work and to learn. Our April edition features Kyriaki Koukou, who we all call Kiki.

Kiki is our Greek language goddess. She teaches Ancient Greek, Modern Greek and Latin to our students.

When we caught up with her recently, she told us about the mouth-watering Mediterranean food and the blistering beach weather that keep her longing for her homeland.

Q: You’ve always spoken the Modern Greek language Kiki, but you developed a love for languages from a young age. Tell us about that.
A: Yes, I was born in Greece. I’m a native speaker of the Modern Greek language, and I also learnt Ancient Greek and Latin in high school.

Q: What springs in to your mind when Greece comes up in conversation?
A: The food. Greek cuisine it’s a main part of our culture. In fact, Greek culture revolves around food, all celebrations, a wedding, a christening, a funeral. Absolutely everything. Combine that with the warm weather that lasts for the larger part of the year. Thanks to the weather conditions there are several activities, entertainment and events relevant to Greek culture that can take place outdoors.

Q: How has the Greek language influenced your life and career?
A: Back in Greece, I used to teach Modern Greek mainly as a first language, but also as a foreign language, too. Then I had the opportunity to move to England and continue teaching the Greek language as a foreign language. I still attend personal development courses to keep improving myself and my language skills.

Q: What do you get up to when you’re off duty from everything to do with the Greek language?
A: I love listening to music, baking, cooking, reading in the garden (when the Manchester weather permits!) and going for walks. I’m also a keen cinema-goer. So, I’m looking forward to getting back in front of the big screen in the not too distant future.

Greek is the word for Kiki. Have her musings inspired your interest in learning the Greek language? We’d love to hear from you and talk you through the Ancient and Modern options available at La Academia.

Many translators have felt that translation or interpreting by a machine would never match the accuracy and understanding of idiom that a human translator or interpreter brings.  With advances in computing speeds computer scientists have been making progress in providing some automated translation of written language, but please don’t rely on it, and never use any of these automated systems to translate business documents or your website! They may be cheap or even free, but it’s a false economy – failure to get your point across in your translated brochures or inaccurate, misleading or hard-to-understand materials will be counterproductive overseas.

However, it now looks as though speech translation may just have got a step closer.

On October 25^th Rick Rashid, Microsoft’s Chief research Officer, was speaking at Microsoft Research Asia’s 21st Century Computing event, and he demonstrated an innovation in speech translation (or interpreting). Using a technique called Deep Neural Networks, which is based on human behaviour, researchers and Microsoft have been able to improve speech recognition systems.

Until recently, error rates of around 20% were standard on machine interpretation of speech, but the new research has reduced the error rate considerably.  Instead of 1 word in every 4 or 5 being incorrect, now the error rate is 1 word in 7 or 8. This looks like a genuine breakthrough in improving speech translation.

Mr Rashid’s presentation showed how spoken English is translated into Chinese speech.  Step 1 takes the speaker’s words and finds the Chinese equivalents. Then step 2 reorders the words, as Chinese word order is different to English.  The machine then renders the speech in the voice of the speaker, which is a great step forward.

There will still be errors in the translation, however the error rate can only improve and in a few years’ time we may be looking at the first speech translation machine to pose a genuine threat to the livelihood of a trained interpreter.

But what if you have a brochure that needs translating a little quicker than that, or an interpreter for a meeting?  Not to worry – until Douglas Adam’s vision of a babel fish translating any language you hear into your own becomes reality, you can rely on la Academia to provide top-quality translation and interpreting services that will help you grow your overseas business.  Translation of brochures and marketing materials requires more than just translation of words – send us details of your project and let us advise you on the best approach to your overseas markets!

Our translators all translate into their native language, which is the best way to ensure idiomatic, fluent translations in the target language. We offer business translation into Spanish, German, Italian, French, Russian and Chinese amongst others – contact us if you have a translation requirement in another language and we will help find a suitable translator.

Increasingly, clients are looking to translate their websites into other languages; our own website is of course available in both Spanish and English, and if we weren’t so busy translating for clients we’d roll it out in more languages!

Give us a ring and let us know which languages you are interested in and a sample of the documents you want to have translated, and we’ll do the rest!