Beth Worthy
7/9/2020
In April 2019, CNBC reported that for the first time, online shopping overtook a major part of retail. The market share of online U.S. retail sales was reported to be higher than brick and mortar store sales, as reported by the Commerce Department. Most retail giants have online stores now to capture the online market, and they need websites translated into several languages to reach the global market.
With more upcoming businesses in all the industrial sectors, having a dedicated, professional, and multilingual website can help achieve better profits and expand the global reach. A multilingual site also helps businesses increase their productivity with minimal operational costs and provides unparalleled services to sustain multi-domain business operations.
Translations should be relevant to the language and culture of the target group, or the message of the organization may get “lost in translation.” Companies aim to capture international markets by bridging various cultural and linguistic gaps. Outsourcing translation jobs to professional translation companies can help to properly communicate your company’s message.
Let’s see why teams of human-translators achieve far more than machine translators.
Here are a few questions that you should ask before choosing your translation services company.
In the late 1980s, when KFC opened in Beijing, the restaurant translated its slogan “Finger-licking good” to a not so appetizing "Eat your fingers off" in Chinese. This is a classic example of focusing too much on a word to word translation instead of analyzing the context and essence behind the sentence. Foreign phrases and words often have varied meanings. If their usage is not based on the correct context and region, they will not resonate with the target audience.
If a word has multiple meanings, then the machine translating software would generally choose the simplest and most common choices that might not correlate to the organization’s original message.
Outsourcing multilingual website translation to a professional translation services company can prevent such problems and seamlessly convey the organization's message to match customer needs.
Over 75% of online shoppers prefer personalized shopping experiences. Using automated translation technologies limits creating excellent experiences. Website localization services provided by professional human translators give a personal touch to the otherwise emotionless machine-aided website translation services.
Also Read: Outsourcing Translation Work: How to Tide Over the Difficulties
Machine translation cannot convey cultural contexts and personalize foreign language interactions. The best website translation services have skilled translators to create customized and humanized website content. Therefore outsourcing professional translation services can boost the relevance of your products to the audience by creating the appropriate content.
Using machine translation to translate between two different languages is difficult. Machines don’t give precise results due to varying grammar and structure rules. The right to left writing style of many languages like Arabic often complicates their translations.
The content on retail websites generally consists of product names, descriptions, and reviews with multiple product additions to the list daily. Translation software may not be equipped to handle this. When creating a multilingual website, work with a company that has a skilled and experienced team of translators is the best way to tackle the customer’s requests.
Machine translation aims to automate language translation, but it can’t identify any typographical or other errors occurring during the translation process. To rectify these errors and mistranslations, humans would have to review them again. Thus despite having the technology to complete the work, there’s still the need to rely on humans.
This takes more time and human resources, which means it can cost more money. Generally, website translation services cost depends on the volume of site content and that of the original text and some base charges, but the prices may be negotiable on a case-to-case basis.
Therefore, it can be said that in the long run, machine language is not the most feasible option to create your multilingual website if it’s intended to cater to the global customer.
Outsourcing website translations to professional translation services with skilled resources will help you complete your task seamlessly without any errors while adapting the web content for audiences from varying regional backgrounds.
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