Crafting stellar marketing campaigns is no small feat. It takes time, thoughtful strategy, and plenty of trial and error to create a notable and lasting marketing campaign in one language. When you’re launching an international campaign, marketing translation services must be part of your plan.
The difference between companies that fail and succeed globally isn’t marketing budget or C-suite size. Rather, it’s about the skillfulness of marketing translation services. Marketing is about emotion, and what triggers specific emotions is highly cultural. Professional translation services help you retain the feeling while remaining authentic to each target market.
Professional Marketing Translation Services Drive Revenue in Global Markets
Marketing campaigns rely on emotion to drive action, but nothing can be done if people can’t read an ad. Customers prefer to interact with brands that speak their language. Exceptional marketing translation services open new doors to various target cultures while maintaining brand voice.
Marketing translators do more than open doors; they also keep them from closing. 75% of customers heavily prefer to buy from brands in their own language, but nearly half of consumers won’t interact at all with English-only websites. Print, digital marketing, and social media translations effectively convey your marketing messages so your international audiences get to know your brand.
The Cost of Mistakes in Translated Marketing Campaigns
Even the biggest corporations have failed to launch an international marketing campaign, because direct translations rarely capture the nuances of marketing language. One infamous example is KFC launching in China with a slogan that translated “Finger lickin’ good” to “eat your fingers off.”
Print or digital marketing translation services aren’t like technical translation services, which must use precise word-for-word literal translations into other languages. It’s about ensuring that your language and imagery land with the right cultural associations and align with your brand reputation.
Improperly translated global marketing campaigns caused international notoriety—but not with positive associations for each target audience. Luckily, these mistakes weren’t lasting; today, KFC is one of the top fast food chains in China.
Understanding Translations versus Transcreation for Your Marketing Strategy
Marketing campaigns rely heavily on cultural references, jokes, slang, idioms, wordplay, and callbacks to pop culture moments. The major challenge is that these cultural references cannot be directly translated across cultural lines, because humor and pop culture are culturally specific.
Transcreation recreates the impact and emotion without directly translating the words. With transcreation services, marketing translators remake your existing marketing content to retain its emotional impact while restructuring the copy to feel authentic to local audiences.
After KFC’s initial slogan blunder, they used a tagline that translated to “Life is so beautiful with KFC.” The American Dairy Association switched its Spanish tagline to “Familiar, Amor, y Leche.” Transcreation in marketing ensures that your ad or campaign resonates as intended with each specific audience, keeping your brand consistent across language lines while fostering connection.
What Marketing Content Localization Really Means in New Markets
Localizing your translations helps marketing campaigns resonate with audiences. But your marketing materials extend beyond your ad taglines. Your website is marketing. Your social media is marketing. Your emails are marketing. And if you’re only showing up in an English-speaking brand voice, you’re missing out on potential customers around the world.
Localization understands that how someone navigates a website in Canada is different from how someone navigates a website in China or the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It’s not just about the words. It’s about the images, colors, references, currency display, and user interface. Professional localization services ensure that you show up for every customer, from your website to advertising campaigns, in the way that they expect.
Legal Necessity of French Translations in Canada
In Canada, brands operating in Quebec must meet strict French-language requirements. Quebec is not the only province with a large population of Canadian French speakers, but it does have the strictest language requirements. Canadian French translation services are a key piece of reaching Canadian audiences. Depending on where your brand operates, possibly a legal requirement as well.
Building a Multilingual Marketing Translation Strategy
For large companies, implementing marketing translation can feel overwhelming. But with the right marketing translation agency, it’s simple. Here’s how JR Language helps you create a marketing translation strategy that makes sense for your business.
Do Market Research
Knowing your audience is the first step in marketing translation. There’s no reason to create a Spanish version of your website if most of your international customers live in French-speaking countries. What countries do you operate in? Where in the world are existing customers visiting your website from? This is your starting point for customizing your translation strategy and prioritizing language access.
Once you know which languages your existing customers speak, consider where your target audiences are or where your competitors currently operate. That’s your second language priority.
Inventory Existing Marketing Materials
It’s helpful to prioritize content for translation, and to do that, you need to know what assets you have. Doing an inventory of marketing content and assets helps you identify top priorities (revenue-generating content like websites and product descriptions) and lower priorities (such as blogs and case studies). Our team can help you figure out which content assets are top priority and which can wait.
Professional Translation Services: Work with Native Language Speakers within Your Industry
The best professional translators have two levels of qualifications: native-level fluency in your target language pairs and industry-specific expertise.
If you work in oil and gas and you’re expanding into Africa, it’s not enough for a translator to speak French. You need a professional translator who speaks the specific French dialect of Cameroon and has worked in the energy and gas sector. If your maritime business is expanding into Japan, you need a professional translator who speaks Japanese and is familiar with international safety regulations.
At JR Language Canada, our marketing translators are native speakers of their languages, fluent in their language pairs, and have specific industry experience to ensure that your marketing translations are culturally relevant, industry-appropriate, and legally compliant.
Keep Brand Voice Consistent Across Language Lines
When you’re working with an international company across multiple languages and ongoing translation projects, keeping your voice consistent is vital to maintaining a consistent brand presence. JR Language Canada offers an established translation process that makes it simple and efficient to scale your translations with:
- Style guides that establish consistency in your brand voice in every language
- Glossaries to keep key terms consistent
- Context documents to explain campaign nuances to translators
- Visual elements and reference materials showing what “good” looks like
- Central coordination from a dedicated project manager to keep everyone aligned
Investing in Global Growth with Professional Translation Services
High translation quality and localized content ensure your marketing message resonates with global audiences and aligns with local preferences, while poor quality can erode cultural relevance and brand consistency. JR Language Canada has helped businesses across Canada and around the world for decades, with experienced marketing translation services that create emotionally resonant, culturally appropriate messages. Whether you’re expanding operations from British Columbia into Quebec or launching internationally, professional translation services help you establish a global brand presence.
Speaking your customer’s language is always a winning strategy. Reach out to JR Language Canada today to find out how marketing translation services and multilingual marketing can help you tap into markets that you’re currently missing out on.
