The power of the Internet is its ability to reach across mountains and oceans into the heart of remote towns and villages. This is even more emphasized by the popularity and availability of mobile phones and other devices that are Internet enabled. A business through its on-line presence will have the world as its market by the flip of the switch. The only barrier becomes that of communication rather than distance and physical limitations. An e-commerce site entering a new market will now have to communicate its value proposition, the quality of its products, support information and specifications and many other communication pieces that have to be delivered in the language of the potential buyer. This is, of course, in addition to the basic e-commerce fundamental requirement of currency conversion and fulfillment issues.

Translating a product catalog into another language is not an easy task. However, depending on the nature of business the reward can be substantial. So what would a business need to do in order to achieve a well-done and culturally acceptable translation?

1. Repeat after me “NO MACHINES”: This might be an obvious point to make but I want to make it nonetheless. Not only is machine translation not good enough but it also can be damming. Even if the translator was able to translate each world correctly the result is not always guaranteed to have the desired effect. This is because the context in which a word is found can dictate its meaning or semantic. When translating the word spring into German one needs to know if we are talking about the season (Frühling) or the water spring (Quelle). More importantly though, the sentence structure cannot be carried over from one language to another mechanically. When translating English into right to left languages like Arabic automatically, I found the result in many instances to be misleading. Worst yet, sometimes I found it to convey the opposite of what the original text intended. And that was not because of the choice of vocabulary that the automated-translator made but rather because of the sentence structure it choose.
2. Prep your original text: The complexity and success rate of the translation project depends heavily on the quality and complexity of the original text. If the original text is full of regional references and play-on words the translation task will require cultural historian in addition to a translator. My word of advice is “the simpler the better.” In addition to simplifying the language one need to make the text more culturally sensitive. For instance, saying that something is as good an old bottle of scotch will not get you far in the Middle East where 90% of the people detest alcohol.
3. Idioms and Metaphors are simply hard to translate sometimes: choose wisely when it comes to metaphors and idioms in your text. First they don’t always convey the same message when they are translated literally. If you were not a German speaker would you think that the translated German saying “Here lies the dog buried” means “that is the crux of the matter”? How about “This is a nice beetle” would you immediately think that this means “nice trick.” And surly it goes the other way around. Do you think that anyone who is not familiar with the western alphabet -yes there are few of those and many of them with money- would understand “dot your i’s and cross your t’s”.
4. Use a professional translator: Now that your text is ready you need to hire a professional who is not only versed in the language but also knowledgeable about your industry. The translator you hire need to be an expert in the lingua of your domain.
5. Start over: Throughout the process there has to be continuous feedback loop. For example, the original text might need to be reworked if in order to generate a better result.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 26th, 2009 at 5:48 pm and is filed under Consulting, Sales and Marketing, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.