Expanding your business is exciting – until you realise your content means something wildly inappropriate in another language. Unfortunately, this is a true story for many. Not too long ago a global brand marketed their product as “Brings You Back to Life,” but in one particular region it translated to “Brings Your Dead Ancestors Back.”!
Such translation mistakes can lead to confused customers and a lot of stress in the boardroom.
So, when is the right time to seriously consider professional certified translation services? It’s certainly not after you’ve already made a cultural faux pas or left your audience scratching their heads!
Whether you’re expanding internationally, launching a new business campaign or translating your legal documents for a business partner – translation can make or break the impact you want to have.
In today’s article, we discuss the perfect timing for obtaining certified language translations to ensure that your message lands precisely as you intended.
Why Certified Translations Should be Your Top Priority
Translation isn’t a task you tack on after the hard work is done. Instead, it’s a strategy that should sit at the core of your project planning. Waiting until your product is “market-ready” to think about translation can double your costs and triple your headaches. However, when you plan for translation early, you set yourself up for fewer costly revisions.
Let’s say you’re designing a website for an English-speaking audience, but you know you’ll be entering the Spanish market. Spanish text typically takes up to 40% more space. If your designers don’t know this upfront, they’ll create a layout that looks sleek in English but crams like a bad suitcase in Spanish. Now you’re stuck redesigning everything.
It’s not just websites, either. Translation affects your brand’s tone, visuals, marketing campaigns, business documents and even how you approach sales. An official product manual, for instance, might need to accommodate languages that read right-to-left, like Arabic, or require different imagery to suit cultural norms.
So, by considering professional translation services as early as possible, you maintain consistency across your brand. Besides, you also show your future markets that you respect their culture from day one.
In reality, the ideal solution to ensure your documents are professionally translated and adhere to all certification and accuracy procedures is to work with an authorised translation provider or a registered professional translator. Some of the leading certified translation providers include Certified Translation Services 24 (TS24) and RWS. You can also find professional certified translators on websites such as Proz.com or CIOL.
The Advantages of Early Translation Planning
When translation is part of your strategy from day one, you build a framework for consistency across markets. Your marketing materials? Cohesive. Your website? Ready to adapt. Your product? Easily integrated into new languages.
Early translation planning also shows your audience that you’re not treating them like an afterthought. That level of consideration builds trust (and trust builds loyalty). Here’s why early translation planning matters.
Building a Scalable Translation Team
No two projects are alike when it comes to translation. Some require a single linguist to perfect a marketing brochure. In contrast, others demand a battalion of translators to handle an international product launch across multiple languages.
For instance, if you’re preparing to roll out a global campaign in 15 different markets, each region needs localised web content, product manuals, ad materials, and whatnot.
This isn’t a job for one person burning the midnight oil. Instead, it demands a coordinated effort that may require dozens (or even more) of translators working to perfect your message.
Need a team fluent in technical jargon? Done. A crew that can nail creative copy? No problem. Planning early is the key here. It lets translators coordinate schedules and workflows for a smooth process.
Leveraging Technology
Planning early means fully utilising the potential of Machine Translation (MT) and human expertise. Consider you’re about to launch a new product line. Your website and manuals are loaded with technical jargon. Fortunately, MT can handle most of that — no problem.
But what about your marketing copy, with its snappy headlines and brand personality? Well, that requires some extra TLC from an experienced human editor to ensure your tone isn’t lost in translation.
The beauty of early translation planning is that you can determine the ideal combination of MT and human effort ahead of time. You’ll know which parts of your content need speed and scale (MT, that is) and which need that personal touch (post-editing, in this case).
When you do this upfront, you won’t find yourself rushing into a project and hoping the tech sorts it out. Instead, you’ll be playing the long game, which is efficient and ensures that when the world sees your content, it resonates just as you intended.
Adapting Media for Global Audiences
If you’re marketing a product globally, you can’t just add translation to your existing visuals and call it a day. What works in one market may fail in another. You might need to swap out images with cultural references or even re-shoot product photos to appeal to a different aesthetic. It could be something as simple as adding subtitles to a video or as complex as re-recording voiceovers to match your new market’s tone.
All of this takes the right coordination and a team of specialists. From graphic designers to voice actors, these elements require a careful schedule to keep everything aligned with your global strategy. Planning ahead means your visuals and audio are just as polished in their new market as they were in the original.
Navigating Certified Translation Requirements
When it comes to certified and official translation, there’s a whole other level of complexity that comes with legal requirements. Ignoring these could land you in serious trouble. Certain countries, or even specific regions, have legal language mandates that you need to follow to avoid fines.
Take Canada, for example. It’s bilingual, so the law requires that all product packaging (whether it’s a luxury watch or a can of soup) must feature both English and French. Even if you’re in Newfoundland, where French speakers make up less than 1% of the population, that requirement still stands.
Anything that touches the legal side of things takes time. You can’t rush the process. Therefore, plan ahead, and you won’t be caught scrambling when a language requirement rears its head (especially in markets where the clock is ticking, and the rules are strict).
Planning for the Unexpected: Contingency Tips for Smooth Rollouts
You know the saying, “The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry”? Well, when it comes to translation projects, the “mice and men” are your carefully organised workflows and timelines.
Guess what? Even with the tightest plan, things happen — delays and last-minute adjustments. So, if you don’t leave room for the unexpected, you might find yourself rushing to keep up.
That’s where contingency time comes in. Instead of watching your plans get derailed when something takes longer than anticipated, you can confidently know that you have a buffer to work with. Here’s how a perfectly planned timeline (with some built-in flexibility) might look:
- Day 1 (Organisation). Collecting and prepping all the materials.
- Days 2-6 (Translation). Your team of translators gets to work. But what if a misunderstanding takes place or something needs clarification? You’ve got wiggle room here.
- Days 6-8 (The Proofreading Stage). If something needs proofreading, the editor will need time to tweak it. That’s where a little extra time can prevent a rush job.
- Day 9 – Quality Check (or the Final Look). The final review may reveal that a few sentences don’t translate as smoothly as you’d hoped. Having a day to handle those last-minute changes prevents disasters.
So…
You could wait until the last minute to hustle through a translation process, but why make it more complicated than it needs to be? The right time for translation is, without a doubt, at the beginning.
The earlier you start, the smoother your rollout will be. Consider it a gift to your future self (and your brand). Professional translation services are critical to creating a more coherent brand voice and experiencing fewer headaches down the road. So, next time, plan for translation from the get-go, and watch how much easier your journey becomes.
