Marketing 101 teaches us that the most successful companies are the ones that establish and maintain a rock-solid brand image. Your branding is your website (domain, content, look and feel, etc.), your logo (what it stands for and what you do with it), marketing, and other communications, right down to the way you handle and manage client inquiries and complaints, and respond to emails (quickly, not at all, respectfully, professionally, etc.). Your brand identity is essentially everything about and related to your company—and by extension, your products or services—in the eyes of your customers.
One of the most important, maybe even the most important, aspects of your brand identity is your company’s ability to keep your messages consistent. Using the same colours and fonts across all media is just as important as conveying the same values, attitudes and personality.
In an era of increased globalization, multilingual companies or any business, company or organization looking to cross the borders of its primary language, should consider the issues that translation raises for the company’s brand, brand identity and brand image.
When you go to the trouble of translating a marketing brochure, report or even your website into another language, you want to make sure your branding in the target language respects your branding in the source materials. We have come up with some things to consider and some ways to help you do this in our two-part series on translating your brand.
Since terminology is key to a customer’s understanding of your products and services—especially in the case of highly technical fields—it is important to make sure you are using the same terms consistently across both languages. If you translate a product that includes an air pump and you have called this product the pompe à air in all of your French marketing materials since the first bilingual brochures came off the press, you want to make sure your translator doesn’t start calling it the pompe pneumatique one day. (Unless of course you have explicitly asked your translator to review the terms currently used by your company and to present credible research to support the choices or suggest alternatives!).
Since it may be impossible to train every employee on every term associated with every product or service your company offers, the easiest way to make sure your terms are translated correctly every time and across all media is to create a terminology list for each language combination. This is usually a separate document created in Word or Excel (we use Excel to create the terminology lists we develop for all of our clients) that lists the terminology equivalents for both the source and target languages. Separate terminology lists for each language combination (French to English, English to French, Spanish to English, English to German, etc.) are important for cataloguing the terms your company uses on a regular and recurrent basis.
Terminology lists may seem like a lot of work, but they don’t have to be. They can be as simple or as elaborate as you like; however, the simpler they are, the easier they will be to work with, both for you and for anyone else in charge of keeping the files up-to-date. The easier they are to work with, the more likely you are to update them. In addition, you can create as many terminology lists as you need and target them to specific areas of your marketing campaign. You might consider a terminology list detailing your products and services, a list of human resources terms with job titles and duties, even a list of your brand names, slogans or trademarks with relevant information about each.
And don’t forget that regular updates are vital! If updated regularly as your company introduces new terms, updates old ones or eliminates archaic ones from use, a terminology list can become a handy reference for all your translation projects in a particular language pair. And the best part about maintaining a separate terminology list is that you can easily share it! Share it with your project manager, your translator, your proofreader, your marketing company or anyone else involved in conveying your message from one language to another.
Stay tuned for Part 2 of our series next week on information and tips for translating your company’s brand successfully!
[...] We hope you’re enjoyed Part 2 of our two-part series on information and tips for translating your company’s brand successfully. If you missed Part 1 of the series, you can read it here. [...]