Kill the Russians??

From the Globalisation Group - a hooter as usual:

A few months ago, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was released and began setting numerous world records for video game sales. Unfortunately, the game also received negative publicity for including some frustrating mistranslations.

At the center of the issues is the "No Russian" scene, in which [the character] Vladimir Makarov is supposed to tell the player "Remember, no Russian." In the story, this is a straight-forward message: as a Russian nationalist, he doesn't want his men speaking Russian as they kill civilians. But in Japanese, it was apparently translated to, "Kill them; they are Russians."
The result was that Japanese players were shooting the wrong characters in the game, causing the players to prematurely see "game over" flash on the screen. Note translator: be a little extra cautious whenever translating an order to kill or "game over" may not be the worst consequence of your actions. Fortunately, Modern Warfare 2 has been very highly anticipated, so all the publicity enabled confused Japanese players to quickly identify the problem and adjust accordingly. If only everyone could recover so quickly from such translation errors...

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For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/

Get a Piece of That Cake, Quickly

Is your company doing business with the Arab world?

The Google CEO, on a visit to Riyadh, predicted that the Kingdom would have a bright future because of its large young population. He said the Arabic content on the Worldwide Web was expanding by the day. "The Internet Arabic content will increase further due to the presence of a large Arab population estimated at 300 million," he said, adding that Saudi Arabia would have a big role to play in expanding Arabic content on the Internet. According to statistics published in 2009, 48 million Arabs use the Internet.

Google International has two offices in Egypt and Dubai but no presence in any other Arab country. It has introduced Arabic language in its search engine and provides translation services from different languages to Arabic. But be careful - Arabs are very touchy about their language. After all, the language is sacred because the Koran came down in it. So Google-type mess of machine translation is a very sure way of making unhappy and offended clients.

If you are doing business with the Arabic-speaking world, it is time to localise at least the most important parts of your website NOW. For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at www.arabic.com.au .

Translation isn't enough

Chanin Balance, President & CEO of viaLanguage, on international marketing:

- By the end of 2010 over 1 billion people will have access to the Web.

- Non-English speaking consumers drive nearly 70% of the world's economy.

- Companies are leveraging the power of the Web to present themselves and their products [to new consumers].

- Language tools are great but they can't account for cultural differences and language nuances.

- The use of social platforms, video clips, tweets and other tools, companies must adapt not only to the language differences but to cultural differences.

- In the short-term, campaigns should be created country-by-country, with both language and cultural differences taken into account.

- There are smart things businesses can do to be reusable such as internationalizing their copy. Once the labor-intensive translation and localization is done and proofed, one should take that content and design all their documents, campaigns and products to easily adapt to the various languages and regional markets without the need for major engineering on their Web sites.

- Communication challenges frequently occur when businesses begin to market across cultures. One key step that is often overlooked or short-cutted, is localization. No matter what vehicle you use, multicultural marketing is more than just translating an advertisement, website or even a blog or twitter posting. Businesses need to actually embrace the nuance of a culture and culturally adapt their messages and brand.


For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/.

Even more reasons to have a multilingual website

This from the Marketing Blog

(1) English is not a predominant language in the Internet any more. As the Internet grows, so does the variety of languages. Having a multilingual website means you will be able to sell much more to those new customers. Fundamental, my dear Watson!

(2) If your website is translated to many languages, it receives not just many new orders, but it enjoys a bigger flow of traffic. Your website will receive more visitors. So you can use gadgets such as AdSense ads more efficiently and will receive more CTR and will increase overall dollar amount per day.

(3) Multilingual website brings credibility to a company. Not a cheap free machine translation, for sure. Errors may hurt reputation of a company. Poorly done, machine translation may erode a company’s reputation completely. We are talking a real professional human approach to translation. Professionally done translation adds credibility to your website. Fundamental, too, but you would be amazed at how many CEO's don't get it. Just think Pajero.

For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/.

Translators Boon to Economy

Add three things together:

Economic Migration (outsourcing/multinationals/professional) + the Internet population + social media marketing that reaches incredibly wide audiences.

The result is that you have a highly multilingual market that you need to address IN THEIR LANGUAGE, because even people who speak English well prefer to buy in their own language.

The solution?

Translation.

The fact that language service provider are a boon to the global economy are perhaps not immediately apparent. But if a company, whether large or small, is to get involved with it’s public in a meaningful way it needs to approach them in a manner that their clients understand and like. It needs to buzz in tongues, so to speak.

Companies express their cultural sensitivity by providing their diverse customers with materials in their own languages. For a company not to offer this kind of information would be short-sighted and would not make good business sense.

The role of the translator in the global economy is almost indispensable. The need for businesses to communicate with their clients base that there will always be a requirement for a translator. Not an Internet based software, mind you. Nothing offends more than a garbled information text on a reputable website - it simply renders the owner of the site untrustworthy (if they stuffed my language, they probably stuff lots of other things, too). Putting information out in a foreign language is meant to make things clearer, not more confusing.

Simply translating material is not sufficient; a qualified, professional and experienced translator would need to know what kind of message the company wants to convey to their new client base, and set the tone for the promotion or corporate identity. Certain symbols or ideas that are common coinage in one country may be highly offensive in another. Cultural sensitivity is extremely important.

The role of a translation services provider is not simply to transpose a set of texts or materials from one language to the next, but also to engage with the culture of the target language.

So use a human being. A qualified one. Because that is an investment in your business, not a cost to cut down.

For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/.

GIGO and Marketing Jargon

I am immensely grateful to Lauren Nemec from Applied Languages for the posting on why it is almost impossible to translate marketing crap from English into other languages, especially ones where obfuscation is not a measure of intellectual agility.

A few years back we landed a project for a tourism authority who wanted to "sell" what their area offered to the Arab World. They hired a copywriting company full of young heads and a month later we were presented with 80 pages of "young-head-Aussie" text.

Everything was "unique". And I mean EVERYTHING. Like, each sunset was unique. The sands on the beach were unique. You shopped in a unique atmosphere, buying unique clothes in unique boutiques, sipping unique coffee in unique cafes on unique streets lined with unique trees. And so on, and so forth..

And then there was the very relative, totally undefined term "fun". Getting wet on a unique waterslide was fun as was drying in the similarly unique air funnel. Eating out is fun. Driving down to Brisbane on the congested motorway was "fun". Kids were going to have fun and so were adults, and the dog and the cat.. and your wallet, I assume.

Amazing. Wonderful. Indescribable (how can you write about an indescribable entity, let alone translate it?)

As Nemec says in her blog, it was meant to impress. I translated. The agent in the Middle East read it, convened a phone meeting, and said very clearly: "The translation is very good. Change your copywriters. The English copy is crap."

The error that many companies in the English speaking world fall into is that they think they can smother opposition by the sheer amount of incomprehensible jargon. That might well work for some at the local level, mostly those who speak the same GIGO dialect. But when you translate your materials to Arabic, Polish, or even German (just to mention a few of the ones I know), information is paramount. Information, and cultural sensitivity.

The unique young-heads at the copywriting company did not even bother to think whether what they were saying would be acceptable, let alone attractive, to the Arab audience. So they put in bars and nightclubs as attractions - unique, mind you, until your third glass of whiskey, after which all nightclubs look the same. They marketed open air saunas for both sexes, and marriage ceremonies atop an air balloon. They waxed lyrical (amazing, unique, etc) about wine tours and working dog shows. And, to make things worse, they did not actually explain what all this was about.

I wonder how many of us would pay heavy money to go somewhere overseas for the sole purpose of watching sunsets, get mud baths, and spend the night in a night club drinking. Heavy money, because Arab tourists come over with wives (often a few per one male) and a progeny line the size of a football club. They come mostly to shop. Singapore is cheaper, and their Tourism Board material actually INFORMATIVE (we know, we did it). So Australia loses potential tourism income because we just can't think in other people's ways. It is all unique, mind you.

Someone out there needs to write a cross-cultural marketing course geared at young-airheads.

For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/.

Website Translation for Business - what is involved?

Nowadays, it’s easier than ever for the smallest of home-built businesses to network and trade on the international arena. But the first step towards doing so is to build a fully localized presence in your key target markets– and the process begins with adapting your company website for each country you plan to tap into.

(1) Prepare properly and allocate enough budget to sustain your multilingual marketing campaign - it is costly. Have an international marketing strategy that looks at understanding the consumers themselves it looks at the behavior and psychology of people from the country or market. When marketing internationally, the words ‘language’ and ‘local’ should always go hand-in-hand. Failing to do so can lead to a very costly global venture for businesses where funds may be limited.

(2) When understanding multilingual advertising you need to be aware of key terms, internationalization and localization and the different approaches:

(a) Internationalization - getting the websites designed with a macro view then localizing these websites at a later date.

(b) Localization - translating your original websites content and then putting it into a style which appeals to the target audience. English cannot be used for all international internet marketing activities. By creating localized content you can actually reduce costs whilst expanding business relationships with consumers and employees all around the world. By presenting websites in native languages you are making people four times as likely to buy products from you, also this will double the chances of people reading your website.

(3) Contrary to what many people think, fluency in a particular language doesn’t qualify someone to translate into it. To provide convincing translations, the translator requires first-hand knowledge of the culture of that language which is why most translators will only ever work INTO their native tongue from another language in which they are fluent. Furthermore, many linguists will specialize in a particular subject – such as marketing, engineering or agriculture. If your company’s products or services involve highly technical terminology, you will probably want to consider checking with the translation company that they have suitable candidates with the right level of experience. The important thing to remember when translating your website or any other marketing material is that what works in one country, might not translate the way you want it to in another. What’s clever and witty in one country, might be offensive in another. This is something only a native-speaking translator will know. It’s also important to be wary of dialects within languages. If you translate your website into Arabic, it doesn’t mean you can use it for all Arabic-speaking countries.

Results include a easy way to assess a new product or service in a new market before launching an offline marketing campaign, a significantly higher rate of return on investment, access to international best practices and technology, increased revenue, developing a global brand name and a larger customer base.

For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/.

Social Media As the Universal Translator

Two very interesting blogs last week - the first "Bloggers from Non English Speaking Backgrounds – Share Your Tips and Stories Here" addresses the problems faced by bloggers from non-English speaking backgrounds. According to the blog, they have two main issues:

Not knowing which language that they should blog in – should they blog in their own first language and have a smaller potential readership or blog in English where their readership could be larger but where they had challenges in writing as well?

Feeling isolated from other bloggers – a number reflected that at times they felt that they were not taken as seriously by bloggers in other parts of the world and found networking difficult.

Whereas the blog posting itself is short, the 179 comments (as of 13:30 Sunday) are a serious eye-opener into the hegemony of English in the business world. Reading through some of them, I would agree with the first of the two issues - some of the "Englishes" are so painful to read that it might turn potential audiences off.

To which the second blog entry, titled "Can Social Media become a Universal Translator?", albeit interesting, does not provide any tangible solutions. Automated internet based translations give the gist (sometimes) of what is said, but blogging is not about merely saying things. It is about showcasing how smart you are, your expertise, your marketing abilities. So to me, writing poorly in English, or writing in your own language and letting fishes or microbes or any other such animals translate for you into poor English is one and the same thing.

Is there a market for translators here?

I am very tempted to blog in two languages, having parallel translations of what I write in both English and Arabic. The only problem I have is finding the time to do so, coupled with the lack of any statistical data on how many Arabic-speaking readers are into blogging about translation, language and business.

Then there would be the problem of localising, as not everything acceptable in English would be culturally acceptable in Arabic. Localising, of course, could open a can of worms, with some bilingual readers wanting to know why the translations are localised (i.e. slightly different from the original) or - even worse - attempting to do their own translation of the source English. Maybe starting a brand new blog would provide a solution, but then you are losing your optimisation share (the search engines see it as two blogs, instead of a massive and continually updated single one).

I am open to suggestions.

For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/.

The Pee Phone

From the Globalization Group..

A few years ago, International Systems Research (ISR) released a softphone in Japan called the PPPhone (pronounced "pee pee phone"). Unfortunately, that name does not pass what some people call "the snicker test" in English and many other languages where "pee pee" is understood to mean something else. ISR had some good reasoning for using the PP acronym - they already had a product called PPPush (pronounced "pee pee push") and the two P's referred to other relevant acronyms that began with P and described the function of the product. If they had stayed exclusively in Japan, they might have continued to develop additional pee pee products. However, you will see that ISR has an office in the US and a website in English.

For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/.

More on website localisation..

In the past, there were only two user interfaces in many corporations' cross country websites, that is, a native language website and an English language website. However, because of constant development of international business and increasing number of country-differentiated clients, misunderstanding appears in a lot of aspects and of course, client loss increases. But multilingual websites could effectively help solve such kind of problems.

The basic rule of website translation is not to change the original structure of the original website. Under the rule, the translated website is almost the same as the original one unless clients have some special requirements. Such kind of translation could help clients save cost, but it might not fit the local market culture, habits or other aspects.

Website translation and localization is different from usual document translation. Many other factors besides pure text translation will be involved in the process, such as:

(1) color option or culture consideration - calendars, for example, can differ for different countries.

(2) The code issue must be solved in the translation procedure. UTF-8 is a general code accepted by browsers of most countries and areas, so messy codes hardly appear if you use this code. But there are still some countries' browsers incompatible with this code.

(3) The letters sizes in the website need to be adjusted accordingly. Most western website languages' words are around 8pt in measurement because that size letter makes the whole websites look beautiful. However, characters in Arabic websites are usually more than 12px; if not, viewers couldn't see what the character is clearly. The words in Asian-language websites also need to be a little bigger. Once the words were adjusted, the structure of the websites was necessary to make some adjustment too for maintaining original appearance of the website.

(4) Website optimization is a value-added service. This job includes keyword arrangement in the web page, keyword density management, keyword translation of the webpage code, and the translation and the adjustment of relevant description. After the website go on line, it need to be submitted to important local search engines.

(5) A full-set service is not just confined to text translation, it also contains flash, picture and other elements. If clients are unable to provide such code, translation companies might spent more time on translating and localizing websites.

Website localisation is not easy, but it is worth the effort and the cost if you are serious about expanding beyond the parish green.

For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/.

Got website? Globalising?

According to Common Sense Advisory, more than 50 percent of Web users who purchased online buy only at Web sites where the information is presented in their language. (Going from Simple Translation to Successful Transactions on Global Websites, Common Sense Advisory, March 2007).

Here are the top tips to consider for translating Web content from Mark Tapling of the Language Weaver:

1. Pay attention to the content type

Every content type has an audience, a value that it serves for the business, and a value that it serves for the audience. Because of this, different content has different requirements for translation.

• Some types of content – like advertising material – are highly influential and need to be perfect, thereby requiring human translation.
  
• Other types of content - like documentation - need to be near perfect but don’t require the same nuance as other types of content; this type of content can be served up with translation software and post-edited by a human reviewer. (Maybe!)
  
• Some content - like knowledge bases and FAQs - simply needs to convey facts (but needs to do so quickly); automated translation software from Language Weaver can be effectively leveraged for this type of content. (Oooops! Can't judge the leverage.)

When looking to start or add additional translation, take a look at the content in your organization and consider other translation options to cost-effectively translate the information while still meeting the needs of the business and the audience.

2. Match the translation cycle to the business need

Some types of content only need to be updated and translated every time a new product or service is introduced, such as product documentation, marketing material and product oriented Web content. Other types of content should be translated as soon as they are written, such as bug fixes, FAQs and knowledge base articles, in order to save on ongoing support costs for known issues.

3. Don’t forget about search

When updating Web content, think about how users will find that information if they speak another language. Search is how most people will find information, so keep in mind that content needs to be translated to make it searchable in a visitor’s native language. Some sites pre-publish all translated content to make it visible to search engines, others don’t. Companies that don’t translate content up front are subjecting their site to an unreliable user experience delivered by a free translation plug-in. In theory, this can work, but remember that free translation sites aren’t trained to understand your brand voice and terminology so there is risk built in when putting translation in the hands of free translation.

4. Maintain control of your brand

Whether you use human translation, post-edit output from translation software or use automated translation, brand and term management is something that is crucial for a growing business. Your company has likely spent a lot of money on its brand, so you don’t want it to be at risk when expanding into new regions. For example, what should your product name be in Chinese or Japanese? How should you describe a particular experience with your product or service in another language?

Identify the brand voice you want to maintain, key product names and references, and company terminology up front so that you know how they should be represented in other languages. Working this out ahead of time also helps any translation project go smoothly and lets you maintain more control of your brand across languages.

5. Use the "NOTRANSLATE" tag

A site owner can control content by ensuring proper tagging of the information. While there are several page-level tags available to exercise this control, the most exciting one was recently added by Google. At the page level, site owners can now add a tag called “NOTRANSLATE.” This tag is interpreted by the crawler as a “do not translate” instruction. By setting the “NOTRANSLATE” tag, you ensure that Google’s automatic translation is not offered as an automatic option to anyone performing a search – especially for those pages or parts of your site where you want to make sure YOU, the site and brand owner, decide what the translation should look like without handing over control of the translation to Google’s algorithms. (My favourite tag of the year, that one!)

For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/.

Localisation "Arrrrgh"

Julie from Traduxis warns about the pitfalls of localising your code. Here are her ten tips:

1. Try to team up with a translator as soon as possible.

2. Identify all data that will require localization.

3. Punctuation/spacing: Punctuation and spacing rules differ according to language and region.

4. Avoid Compound messages/string concatenation.

5. Use UTF-16 in coding.

6. Make sure your string comparison methods use the right algorithm for sorting Unicode values.

7. Thinking of machine translation? Think again! To avoid mistranslations, have the help files ready for the translator, screenshots, technical notes or any other documents that will provide context.

8. Make up your mind about terminology and stick to it. These error messages all mean the same thing, but will raise your localization cost needlessly.

9. Once your application is up and running in many languages, keep track of changes you make to your next version, so that only those changes will be translated.

10. Present your customers with a well translated web site.

There is also an interesting posting on "pseudo-translation" - the pre-translation of strings into a fake but legible idiom that mimics a variety of languages. This should expose the following:

1. It will detect problems with encoding across all languages.

2. It will detect problems with string length/height.

3. It will detect hard coded strings.

For all your English to Arabic and vice versa translations that will help you expand your business into the Middle East visit Arabic Language Experts at http://www.arabic.com.au/.