The devil is in the details in any language, and when it comes to ensuring your brand communicates as clearly in Japanese as it does in English, the style guide is your translator’s best friend.
Creating and maintaining a style guide is a worthwhile investment in your brand’s future. Clarity, consistency, and maintaining an on-brand voice depend in part on access to a central reference for translators as they bring your company’s products and service to life in new markets.
Sure, with infinite monkeys, typewriters, and time you’ll produce a Shakespeare play or two, but can you really gamble your international client base on the idea? In this post, we’ll take a look at why a style guide makes a big difference in localization projects.
Do you manage marketing translation and localization projects internally for your company? If your company is new to the concept of going global, you’ve probably encountered a few common problems with communication, project flow, and writing for translation. Don’t worry…with a little effort, you can reduce these hassles.
We’ve put together a few tips that will help you reduce the cost and improve the quality of your translation and localization projects. Integrating these initiatives with your teams can have a profound impact on the reputation of your brand in international markets. Even better, you should see your team’s stress level decrease with improved processes in place.
When you think of certain brands, you automatically think of high quality. You trust that brand and its products or services. You may pay a little more for it (the $100,000 Porsche, for instance). You may recommend it to a colleague or friend.
Quality can be more than the physical craftsmanship of a product or the expertise of a particular service. It can also be linguistic. Linguistic quality assurance (QA) goes the extra step to make your brand stand out among your competitors in any language. Instead of just getting the general meaning across, with linguistic QA you now have more clarity, eloquence and adherence to your overall brand guidelines. Linguistic QA is a best practice for anything that is translated or localized: documents, advertisements, brochures, websites, multimedia, software — anything. Even the language jumble of the sign above needs linguistic QA!
Professional translation ensures a correct translation, but when coupled with QA, it really makes it shine. If you’ve done your translation internally or through in-country partners, you should consider professional QA to double check that the overall meaning follows the original content, that the brand personality is adhered to, and that the translation is of the highest quality.
Smart, fun and useful. Acclaro shares news and tips on translation, localization, language, global business and culture.