Marketing work is a complex task. Successful marketers have a deep understanding of their target audience and what makes them tick, understand the right words to use to connect with people and make them engage with a brand and have a flair for creativity.
When it comes to marketing products overseas, the task is even greater. That’s why a client turned to us recently for our marketing translation expertise. He had a presentation in French that he wished to convert to Chinese. We were delighted to be able to provide the professional language and marketing skills that he needed.
When we talk about speaking ‘Chinese,’ we’re actually referring to a number of languages and regional dialects. China is home to 55 different national minorities, each with their own spoken language (though many of these have no written form). Mandarin (‘Putonghua’) is the county’s official dialect and there are a number of other major dialects, including Cantonese and Hunanese.
Over 70% of the population of China speaks Mandarin and the majority of the Chinese translation clients with whom Tomedes works are looking for Mandarin translation. To meet their needs, we have built up a network of professional Mandarin translators.
For this client, our Chinese translation involved converting his marketing presentation from French to Mandarin. He needed to share it with a business contact in China and wanted to ensure that the Chinese version was word-perfect before he did so. You can read more about our experience of delivering accurate Chinese translations by clicking the link below.
Read more: English to Mandarin App Translation
As part of our initial discussions with the client, we raised the idea of localization. This is the process by which translations are adapted to meet the cultural expectations of their new audiences. It can involve changing images, colours and some parts of the copy. (Localization is a separate process to transcreation, which involves a more in-depth overhaul of the materials in question).
The client immediately grasped the value of localization in terms of ensuring that his presentation was as engaging as possible to Chinese viewers. As such, we assigned our leading marketing translation and localization expert to work on his document.
By matching our translators’ skillsets (rather than just the languages that they speak) with our client’s jobs in this way, we ensure that each translation is delivered by a relevant expert. It’s one of the reasons that we maintain such a comprehensive global network of translation professionals – so that we can offer enhanced translation services where the translators are always ideally placed to work on the jobs at hand.
Our network includes many marketing translation professionals, as such skills are always in demand. Indeed, the global marketing industry is worth a staggering worth $1.7 trillion, according to Redburn and PwC. With so many countries undertaking paid promotions and sales promotions overseas, marketing translation and localization work that is sympathetic to the needs of local audiences plays a key role in this.
For this client, we got to work translating and localizing his marketing presentation. In full consultation with him, we reworked some parts of the copy to make them more palatable to Chinese audiences, while translating the other sections directly.
The client also used our desktop publishing services, as he wanted to ensure that the final, Chinese version of his presentation looked as good as it sounded. Our expert team is available to work on documents of all shapes and sizes and in a wide range of file formats.
For this job, that meant recreating the presentation in colours that were more suited to Chinese viewers. The original template had a very elegant black design around the slides, but black can be associated with secrecy and darkness in China – hardly the messages that a marketing document wants to convey! We created a similarly elegant border, but in red – a colour associated with success and good fortune and therefore much more appropriate.
We also swapped the images in the presentation for ones featuring Chinese individuals. This is a common part of localization work as the more the audience can connect with the brand or products in question, the better, and imagery is a powerful way to achieve this.
The client was delighted with the final result. His presentation was not only linguistically perfect, but also looked fantastic. Subtle changes had given it a much more Chinese feel, which was precisely the point of the localization process.
Do you have a presentation, app, website or document of any other kind that would benefit from thoughtful localization, as well as translation? If so, it’s worth speaking to the Tomedes team about what you need. We can provide a range of appropriately experienced language professionals, so just let us know how we can help.
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