What are you risking when you use a free online translation tool for your documents or your website?

• Future sales. Consumers can't use the product properly if the instructions are unclear or incorrect.  Who do they blame?  Your product. And, who do they tell? When someone is satisfied with a product, they tell one person.  When they have a complaint, they tell ten people.
• Your bottom line.  What happens if you're sued because the product was not used correctly? A woman in Houston was given a prescription that was to be taken once a day.  Unfortunately, she read "once" as the Spanish number for eleven.
• Your reputation. Your customers will know you were too cheap to spend money on a professional translation.  What message does that send about the quality of your products or services?
• Lost business. When potential customers visit your website, they may find the translation amusing, but what will they think about your product?  Will they trust your company enough to open up their wallets?  Or will they find a company that respects them enough to communicate with them correctly?

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Photo by jovike. Licensed under Creative Commons.

Westerners see empty space in a design as a void, while the Japanese think empty space offers possibilities.   Consider the Japanese view when designing printed marketing materials that will be produced in several languages.

White spaces allow you to avoid formatting problems when you produce the translated versions.  If your text has expanded (see earlier post on Translation Tips:  Will the translation fit in your layout? Part 1), you won't have to resort to reducing the font size, which can make your copy difficult to read. 

For translations, remember that less really is more.

Some rights reserved. Photo by Masaaki Miyara. 

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You're just about finished with the edits and tweaks on your brochure.  The next step is to have it translated.   Before you do, remember that when English copy is translated, the text expands.  More words will be needed to communicate your message in many other languages.  Does your layout have room for this expanded text?

As a rule of thumb, when English is translated into Romance languages (French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish) the number of words will increase by 20-25%.  One of the easiest things you can do to make sure the translation fits is to edit the English text before it is translated.  Adjectives are great, but get rid of them if they're not essential.

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Photo by peppergrass. Licensed under Creative Commons.

Baseball may be known as America's pastime, but its players have come from more than 45 countries.  On Opening Day last year, 28% of the players on major league team rosters were born outside the United States.  The Dominican Republic was represented by the most players - 88 - followed by Venezuela with 52 players. 

The Dominican Republic has sent close to 500 players to the show, beginning with Ozzie Virgil who played for the Washington Senators in 1932.  The San Francisco Giants added the first player from Japan, Masanori Murakami, to their roster in 1964.

Cuba had a professional baseball league beginning in 1878, and the teams had 10 players on the field.  Cuban teams fielded two shortstops, with one playing between first and second bases.  Between 1947 and 1961, the Cuban League partnered with Major League Baseball, and the league was used for player development until professionalism was outlawed by Castro.

 I'm rooting for the Calcetines Rojos.  What's your favorite equipo de béisbol?

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Our friends at www.marketingexperiments.com are researchers whose mission is "to discover what really works in optimization".    They offer the following tips for optimizing Spanish-language websites:

• Make sure your landing page answers the following questions for your visitors:

              Where am I?  What can I do here? Why should I do it?

• Your headline should confirm the value of your site and let them know they came to the right place
• Try to quantify the benefit for the visitors: "Save 50% on your calls to El Salvador".
• Are there any cultural elements that will connect with them, such as having a famous Mexican actress endorse a beauty product?
• Test Google ads in Spanish and emphasize value in your ads.
• The entire experience should be in Spanish, including the shopping cart, to avoid losing visitors right before check-out.
• A dedicated Spanish-language site is better than a sub-domain because it communicates more effectively.  It can also improve the site's results in Google searches.

Last but not least, steer clear of online translators such as Google Translate because the poor quality of these translations "undermines your site's credibility, causing anxiety to your visitors...and it becomes insulting".

Photo by marciookabe. Licensed under Creative Commons.

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