When translating a document into a difficult language, you can’t rely on amateurs or machine-assisted translation services. Whether these are personal documents or business paperwork, you must hire someone who can take over major translation challenges with ease.
A professional translator will be familiar with the linguistic complexity of a challenging language and provide a translation accuracy certificate to prove the genuineness of their work.
In this article, you’ll learn why professionals are important for proficient translated works.
10 Reasons Why Professional Translations Are Important
Suppose you need to immigrate from the UK to Spain. You’ll hire someone skilled enough to overcome any challenge in Spanish translation, won’t you? This person will take care of cultural nuances to ensure your translated document’s acceptance rate at the immigration office.
This and many reasons prove why professional translations are vital for success:
Cultural Issues in Translation
You may wonder why big brands and major companies don’t just use Google Translate to convert something into another language. If you explore human vs. machine translation, you’ll realize that machines are unable to give cultural context to the translated piece.
Consider the example of Coors. They wanted to translate their slogan, “Turn it Loose,” into Spanish. However, they ended up telling their audience to suffer from diarrhea due to a poor understanding of the cultural context behind the term. Had they hired a professional, they would’ve told them to choose a different word combination.
Create Localized Content
Professional translations go beyond merely rewriting words from one language into another. It’s about adapting the content to suit your audience’s cultural and regional preferences. Consider the example of KFC when they expanded into Chinese markets in the ’50s; they made two grave mistakes there:
They translated their slogan as “Eat Your Fingers Off” in Mandarin, which sounded bizarre and didn’t convey the right message.
- They didn’t realize that licking your fingers wasn’t a sign of food being tasty in China (cultural ignorance).
A professional translator wouldn’t have overlooked these grave errors. This single example proves that professionals are always better at translation and transcreation projects.
Avoid Idiomatic Mistakes
When it comes to idioms, sayings, and expressions, amateur translators can’t work these things out. You need the careful guidance and expertise of credible professionals. These professional translators aren’t just bilingual beings; they deeply understand the translation challenges that arise when you convert an idiom or saying into another language, particularly a very difficult one.
For instance, the American Dairy Association mistranslated the famous “Got Milk?” slogan into a vulgar question when they were trying to expand into the Spanish market. For Braniff Airlines, they took their sweet time to realize that translating “Fly in Leather” into Spanish referred to nudism.
These examples show why it’s vital to hire professional translators to avoid these big mistakes.
Tackle Untranslatable Words
Some words are almost impossible to translate. They are either made up of existing words or refer to something only natives can understand. For example, these words can be a challenge for amateur translators:
- Waldeinsamkeit
- Iktsuarpok
- Komorebi
- Sobremesa
- Saudade
Professional translators have enough knowledge and proper understanding of these types of words. So they can easily replace them with synonyms or short equivalent phrases.
Expand Your Online Reach
Do you want to expand to an untapped market and reach new audiences? Professional translations can help you bridge the language gap and connect with a wider pool of consumers. In fact, more than 72% of consumers prefer to buy things from a website that communicates in their languages.
That’s why you should work with professionals who understand the nuances of your target language and can make your brand’s messaging resonate with the audiences in question. Only qualified, credible translators have what it takes to tackle a challenging language.
It’s a great way to boost your online traffic. All it requires is to adapt your marketing content to your foreign audience’s expectations.
Get Better SEO Results
Translating your website into different languages is a great way to boost your SEO campaign. You can see better search engine optimization results when your homepage is available in multiple languages. Think of SEO like a horserace; the more horses you bet on, the likelier you are to win the race.
The internet is replete with English websites. However, German, French, Korean, or Urdu websites are less competitive, and you can easily increase your backlink portfolio by hiring professional translators.
Improve Marketing Campaigns
Your marketing campaigns will resonate with your foreign audiences more effectively if rewritten in the target language. Every major brand has the potential to expand into new markets. However, building customer loyalty takes time and effort; it requires appealing to people’s emotions and giving them a reason to come back.
That’s why professional translators and transcreation experts are an important part of any such marketing campaign. They don’t just translate the web content into another language but also localize it for better marketing results.
If you don’t work with credible translators, you’ll be vulnerable to errors and marketing embarrassments like Ford’s famous “Every Car Has a High-Quality Body” fiasco. Ford’s execs wanted to expand into Belgium’s quality market, but they hired amateur translators who converted the slogan into something that advertised a corpse with every car.
If they had worked with professionals, such a marketing disaster wouldn’t have happened.
Save Money in the Long Run
Low-quality translations lead to communication breakdowns, and many businesses have lost millions as a result. HSBC Bank’s “Do Nothing” campaign was a result of someone translating the slogan “Assume Nothing” into this catastrophe. It cost them $10 million to fix this translation error.
This example shows that professionals can tackle all translation challenges on the first go, so you don’t have to spend more money to fill the gaps left by amateur translators.
Avoid Legal Compliance Issues
A well-translated document helps communicate with a foreign audience. Even seemingly small translation mistakes can lead to significant legal disputes. Businesses lose billions when they hire amateurs to do subpar translation work. So, your contracts and other legal documents should be translated by a professional who understands the nuances of the target language and the market’s specific regulations.
Low-quality translations have legal ramifications for individuals as well. When it comes to marriage certificate translation, you must rely on professionals to ensure they do a good job translating the document. That’s especially true if you want to immigrate to another country or remarry overseas.
Avoid Robotic Translations
Another important point is to note that Google-translated documents make the final output look very robotic. That’s because many words have different meanings, and an amateur translator wouldn’t know how to choose the right word based on the context of what’s being said.
That’s why you shouldn’t use automatic tools and hire professionals to get the job done right.
Conclusion
This article covered a few key reasons why professional translations are indispensable in our world. If you care about translation accuracy and overcoming linguistic barriers, hire dependable, experienced folks to work their magic on your documents. Work with TranslateSwift’s certified translators who have expertise in various challenging languages.
Only seek professional translation services to ensure your documents pass the highest levels of scrutiny at the immigration office. An error-free, smartly translated document would take your business to new heights. So, always work with credible translators.
FAQs
How many words do professionals translate in a day?
Professional translators handle between 2,000 and 3,000 words in a single day, but it depends on the complexity of the language in question.
Why is it difficult to translate something from English to another language?
In English, word combinations seem to lack rhyme or reason when translated into another language. So, translators have to deal with untranslatable words very often.
Why can’t machines replace human translators?
Machines have a hard time replacing human translators because their work lacks quality and cultural sensitivity. Robots fail to provide clear, fluid, and easily readable translations.
