Marketing Translation: Marketing Materials, Sales Collateral and Corporate Websites
When creating websites, marketing materials and sales collateral in multiple languages, you are faced with a variety of challenges. Translation is an important part of the process, though not the only one. Some of the things to consider are discussed below, and THE MARKETING ANALYSTS can help you through each of these.
Inputting translated text
Adding text to a website in an unfamiliar language can be tricky. One solution is to include notes and labels which tell you which part of the text is which and where it belongs on your website. If you do this, you should explain the purpose of such notes to your translators.
Another solution is for the translators to enter the translated text into your website. This can work if you have a content management system for your website, though there may be problems text formatting, links and coding. If your translators have some knowledge of such things as HTML and CSS, such problems can be minimized or eliminated.
Fitting the text into your pre-determined space
Text in some languages takes up more space than others. For example German and Russian text usually takes up more space than English, but texts in Chinese and Korean take up less space. Certain sections of websites, particularly menus, often have a fixed width. Sometimes you have to use alternative, shorter translations to fit the available space.
Here is an example of the amount of space taken up by different languages. The same text, font and font size is used for all the languages. This image also illustrates the font size problem - the Chinese and Japanese text is quite difficult to read in this size, but the other languages are perfectly legible.
In some languages, such as Thai and Lao, there are no spaces between words. When building websites in such languages, it really helps if you can read the text in order to add line breaks in appropriate places, otherwise it will overflow the edges of your pages.
Page Layout
If you translate your website into languages that are written from right to left, such as Arabic, Persian or Urdu, the page layout should be flipped over so that it's a mirror image of the pages in left-to-right languages. Some images may need altering and adjustments to the style sheets and some page elements will also be needed.
Font Sizes
Some languages, such as Chinese, Korean and Arabic, are difficult to read at font sizes that are perfectly legible for languages like English, French and Russian. Using separate style sheets is a solution to this problem. Another solution is to avoid specifying font sizes at all, though designers don't tend to be very keen on this as it messes up their design.
Language Services
We offer service in over 180 languages. Our most common language interpretations include: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Turkish and Vietnamese.
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