Hello, everyone. I think we’re just gonna wait a minute or two for, a few other folks to join in, and then we will get started.<\/p>\n
Alright. I think we’re gonna get start recorded. And for those that end up joining a little bit later, we will be sending out a recording as well just for some music to come up. Alright.<\/p>\n
Cool. Well, welcome to MotionPoint’s webinar on welcome to the six challenges of translation and localization. I’m gonna be your host today, Dean Petulik, and I’m really excited to talk you through some of the challenges that we often see and provide a few suggestions as to how you may overcome some of these challenges.<\/p>\n
So let’s dive into it. The first thing I wanna discuss though is what’s the difference between translation and localization? They’re sometimes used interchangeably, but they do have quite different meanings.<\/p>\n
Well, translation is really just translating text from one language to another. What it fails to do is add the cultural nuance. And when you start taking those things into account, that’s where you move from translation into localization. So you’re making a little bit more of a culturally relevant, content for the individual that’s that’s utilizing it. Really what we strive to provide when it comes to localization is content that doesn’t feel as though it was translated to be made accessible to the individual, but rather content that was originally created with the intention of servicing that community. Similar to the content that we create here in English, we want to make sure that it feels very relevant to them, not just something that we tried to make relevant to them.<\/p>\n
So let’s dive into these six most common translation challenges. Number one is figures of speech and tone.<\/p>\n
Within different countries, even regions, you’re gonna find unique idioms, sarcasms, tones, humors that exist that are very significant and relevant to their culture, but may not have any significance, relevance, or connection to individuals outside of that culture. And so they often get lost in translation.<\/p>\n
An example of this would be piece of cake. This is meaningful in English. We all know that this means something was easy, but if you translate it directly into Spanish, pancomito, it will mean nothing. Think to yourself if you are reading an article and it referred to a piece of pretzel. It wouldn’t really do much for you and would probably leave you a little bit confused. So understanding the cultural nuances for things like idioms and sarcasm and tone requires you to have a really in-depth understanding of not just the content that the content of the origin, but also the content of where it is going and the, destination language.<\/p>\n
You also must understand the replication of brand tone or personality. This is something you’re likely investing a lot in in your origin language, and it’s really important to continue to connect with the users in these new cultures in a similar way to how you’re connecting in your origin country without losing your brand identity as well. And this can be a little bit of a challenging area. So you wanna make sure you’re not risking any sort of offensive things to customers, but still maintaining your brand identity. And the best way to accomplish that is through transcreation or creative translation.<\/p>\n
Some tools that are practical to be implemented would be a translator style guide. You may be able to replicate something that you have already as far as a style guide that you’re utilizing to onboard new employees, and you can somewhat retrofit it to enable your linguists that you’re working with to better understand how they should be taking your translations into new languages.<\/p>\n
Challenge number two, finding the right solution. And there is no solution that fits every project.<\/p>\n
Your website is constantly evolving and the solution that’s right for it now may not even be the right solution for you in the future. So it’s really important that you’re taking those things into consideration as you’re selecting the solution upfront.<\/p>\n
Now, managing a website requires a wide variety of skills. You have content creation, UX, and development. When you add a language, it can feel as though you’re multiplying these efforts. Make sure that the resources that you’re applying are able to counter and fit all of those different areas.<\/p>\n
You don’t want to let things start falling behind too quickly, and you don’t want the efforts of what you’re investing in your origin language go to waste. You want to make sure you’re covering all of the same workflow steps in each language.<\/p>\n
To do this, you’re gonna wanna shop around, network, look at reviews and clients of other organizations, and determine what looks best for you and what you think would be most, replicable within your organization.<\/p>\n
Make sure your internal resources align with your goals and technology, not just today, but also in the future.<\/p>\n
Number three. This one is very common. And for anyone that’s done any sort of website migration project, you know, these things often do fall behind. Well, it’s important that you have consistent contingencies in place.<\/p>\n
Most in house teams hired to launch a multilingual website take over a year to launch it. And time is money. Initial conversions, revisions, and updates make it very challenging to complete a launch because you’re trying to hit a moving target. You’re working to fill the backlog of all of the information that exists today, but as you’re doing that, new content is being created.<\/p>\n
Delays to launch are not only expensive, but they also impact other initiatives.<\/p>\n
So make sure that you’re partnering with a concierge level partner that gives you access to industry leading technology and expertise so as to not fall behind. There’s no need to recreate the wheel here. Organizations taking over a year to do this.<\/p>\n
When working with professionals, you can typically see a turnaround time of sixty days or less.<\/p>\n
Having no experience. This is a really common blunder that organizations fall into because seventy five percent of marketers have never translated a website, and ninety percent of them have only done it once. These are the individuals that are being tasked with leading their organization into new cultures.<\/p>\n
You simply don’t know what you don’t know, and different languages create unique hurdles. You may not have an approved font for character based languages. You may not understand or expect some of the challenges that you’re gonna come across. But once you fall behind, it’s increasingly hard to catch back up. Not only is website translation maybe not the top priority now, it’s sort of been put on the back burner, but it still needs to be maintained. Or in a year, you’ll have to redo the whole project because you’ve fallen so far behind your primary website. Do not fall into the set it and forget it mentality.<\/p>\n
And be realistic about the resources, timelines, and costs associated with these things. And in order to do that, you may need to tap a multilingual service, marketing services agency, experts, talking with peers, and understanding that there is a lot that goes into diving into a new culture for the first time. So leverage these experts in industry tools.<\/p>\n
Untranslatable and complex words is challenge number five. Some words are just too specific, very complex, or technical in nature.<\/p>\n
Sometimes words in one language have no direct equivalent in another. That can be a really challenging thing to express, even more challenging when machine translations are being leveraged. In such cases, you’re gonna need translators that can adapt or describe, maybe even borrow the word itself to convey its meaning. The key is to choose a strategy that best retains the word’s essence, while making it understandable for the target audience. And be consistent with that throughout.<\/p>\n
Now you also will run into compound words. Butterfly is an example of this. It has very little to do with butter. And so when you translate butter and fly together, mariposa, you run into a scenario where the word you’re now using does not align at all with what you’re trying to express, and that can create some complications.<\/p>\n
We’ve seen some stories where it’s actually creating offensive language, and now your website is displaying that content, and your team may not even be aware of it. Or it’s just simply not translating those words because it doesn’t have a word to word translation match up. So consider a hybrid approach with transcreation where you’re changing the meaning so that you can find an area where those words do exist in that culture and that will help you connect with those individuals.<\/p>\n
It’s okay to leave some in the origin language and describe them, but it must be done strategically.<\/p>\n
And have a plan for this. It’s going to happen. We recommend utilizing a glossary so that once you’ve challenged once you’ve conquered this challenge, you have a little bit of a framework as to how it was handled previously.<\/p>\n
It can be easily handled again. And then when a new word comes up, you have a little bit of a reference point as to some of the solutions you’ve found worked in the past.<\/p>\n
Sorry about that. Had a pop up there. Have a plan for this as well within edit control.<\/p>\n
In the scenarios where offensive content was created due to mistranslations, you need to make sure that you have ownership to, in real time, dive in and make edits to that translation copy or take it down that isn’t just completely disabling the plugin or application that’s handling your translations. This is a really important one that is often missed until it is too late and can create really big brand issues.<\/p>\n
Number six and the last challenge that we’re going to cover today is cultural nuances.<\/p>\n
Translation alone doesn’t address all the cultural aspects of a language. Effective localization involves so much more. It requires adapting the entire user experience, including visual elements like colors and images, as well as practical elements like currency, date formats, and legal information.<\/p>\n
These adaptations ensure the content feels native and relevant to the target audience, helping to drive engagement and build brand loyalty. However, it can create a lot of challenges for smaller web teams.<\/p>\n
You may not be aware of these native experience cultural awareness and different formatting and colors that maybe don’t reside with certain groups, and those can be offensive. But on top of that, we’re talking about potentially changing the UX to better align with a certain culture, And that can be a lot of work for anyone here that’s worked with UX you understand.<\/p>\n
So making sure that you have human intervention and working with localization experts that staff their own web developers, their own graphic designers, and just being again realistic about this is a potential hurdle that you’re more than likely going to run into. Do you have the internal capacity to handle this? Understanding that new content is being added every day. So this isn’t just a one time thing to be aware of with cultural nuances. It’s an ongoing area that can be really critical in order for you to be successful as you dive into new markets.<\/p>\n
The solution overall, it’s going to be unique for each of us. Different websites, companies, resources, goals, technology, experiences, budgets.<\/p>\n
But a few things that are running true for for all of us is you’re gonna wanna leverage a mix of human and machine translation. AI is becoming increasingly popular, but it cannot yet mimic the quality of human linguists because there’s so much more to translation done well. When you dive into localization, there are areas that translating words into different words just will never be able to capture.<\/p>\n
But when you are leveraging AI, make sure that you’re selecting the right partners within AI. Select partners that allow you to upload a style guide and glossary or even the human translations that you’ve previously done to create an adaptive translation that incorporates your brand and tone at the cost of machine translation as you grow.<\/p>\n
When it comes to AI, it’s not going away, but it’s important that you have additional steps to monitor for it. Like validation, you do not want to have content existing in free flow that does not have any sort of check. Making sure that whatever tool you select has something to validate and post edit any sort of automatic translations.<\/p>\n
And plan for contingencies. Things are going to happen. Make sure that you at least have access to linguists, tools, and support that align with your company values. You’re taking your brand for the very first time and introducing it to a new culture. It’s important that you make sure you put your best foot forward and ensure respectful to all of the different nuances that exist within this new culture if you want them to connect with your brand as you hope they will.<\/p>\n
And with that, we’ve covered a lot of content, and I hope you found this informational. We did strategically leave time for some questions. But I hope by understanding these challenges and employing the right strategies and professional services, you feel you can now effectively communicate your brand message across different languages and cultures, enhancing your global reach and customer engagements.<\/p>\n
So thank you again for joining today’s session. And if you have any questions or would like more information, now we have the opportunity to share those. Emily, if you want to, check the chat and and see what we have there.<\/p>\n
Yeah. If anybody has any questions, you can feel free to leave them in the chat, or in the q and a box.<\/p>\n
We don’t have any right now.<\/p>\n
You’re welcome, though, to send them, to Dean’s email directly, or reach out to MotionPoint at any time.<\/p>\n
Well, we will give a few more moments for some questions. But, again, the QR code on the screen, that’ll bring you right to my LinkedIn, and I hope to see a few LinkedIn connections from all of this. And, again, hope you found this informational.<\/p>\n
Great. Well, I don’t see any here. So, again, thank you for joining today’s session. I hope that you were able to take at least one thing back to your organization.<\/p>\n
And for questions about what some of these tools may look like or where you can access them, my LinkedIn is there. My email is also on the screen here, and I really hope that we’re able to connect and and talk a little bit more about your specific scenario because, again, that’s gonna matter a lot as far as which solution is the best fit for you.<\/p>\n","learn_more_cards":false,"videos_featured_resource_card":"n\/a","hidden_video":"No","docs_short_description":"","docs_keywords":"","doc_social_media_caption_1":"","doc_social_media_caption_2":"","doc_social_media_caption_3":"","doc_social_media_caption_4":"","doc_social_media_caption_5":"","doc_id":"52470","meta_title":"Overcome the Top 6 Challenges of Translation and Localization","meta_description":"Learn how to navigate the complexities of translation and localization and effectively engage your global audience.","meta_keywords":"","md_title_tag":"Overcome the Top 6 Challenges of Translation and Localization","md_meta_description":"Learn how to navigate the complexities of translation and localization and effectively engage your global audience.","md_og_image":{"ID":248358,"id":248358,"title":"ae-webinar-dean-og","filename":"ae-webinar-dean-og.png","filesize":246031,"url":"https:\/\/www.motionpoint.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/ae-webinar-dean-og.png","link":"https:\/\/www.motionpoint.com\/how-health-insurance-marketers-attract-u-s-hispanics\/ae-webinar-dean-og\/","alt":"","author":"2","description":"","caption":"","name":"ae-webinar-dean-og","status":"inherit","uploaded_to":248356,"date":"2024-09-10 15:00:14","modified":"2024-09-10 15:00:14","menu_order":0,"mime_type":"image\/png","type":"image","subtype":"png","icon":"https:\/\/www.motionpoint.com\/wp-includes\/images\/media\/default.png","width":1200,"height":627,"sizes":{"thumbnail":"https:\/\/www.motionpoint.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/ae-webinar-dean-og-150x150.png","thumbnail-width":150,"thumbnail-height":150,"medium":"https:\/\/www.motionpoint.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/ae-webinar-dean-og-300x157.png","medium-width":300,"medium-height":157,"medium_large":"https:\/\/www.motionpoint.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/ae-webinar-dean-og-768x401.png","medium_large-width":768,"medium_large-height":401,"large":"https:\/\/www.motionpoint.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/ae-webinar-dean-og-1024x535.png","large-width":1024,"large-height":535,"1536x1536":"https:\/\/www.motionpoint.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/ae-webinar-dean-og.png","1536x1536-width":1200,"1536x1536-height":627,"2048x2048":"https:\/\/www.motionpoint.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/ae-webinar-dean-og.png","2048x2048-width":1200,"2048x2048-height":627}},"md_og_title":"Overcome the Top 6 Challenges of Translation and Localization","md_og_description":"Learn how to navigate the complexities of translation and localization and effectively engage your global audience.","md_og_keywords":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.motionpoint.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/videos\/248439","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.motionpoint.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/videos"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.motionpoint.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/videos"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.motionpoint.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=248439"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"resource_categories","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motionpoint.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/resource_categories?post=248439"},{"taxonomy":"targeted_localized_audience","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motionpoint.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/targeted_localized_audience?post=248439"},{"taxonomy":"document_categories","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motionpoint.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/document_categories?post=248439"},{"taxonomy":"redesign","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.motionpoint.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/redesign?post=248439"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}