Translation is one of them. The other day, I stumbled upon a tweet from a British punk music curator who had translated Smash Mouth’s “All-Star” to biblical Aramaic and then back to English. The experiment went about as well as you might imagine. Brands love to talk about scaling globally. But marketers don’t always know how to scale their content in a way that works out. Instead of hiring a team of five in a new country and allocating significant resources from your budget, starting with content translation can help you understand the details of a new market before investing too much too soon. What you need is a human being to do that translation work for you—but even that process has its own complications. When a brand scales internationally, good translation is often a necessary addition to its content strategy. But as evidenced above, the marketing team can’t simply run every blog post through an app and hope to see results. As our clients came to us asking about content translation, we decided to make a distinction to help them with their global efforts.
Technology can make most tasks easier, better, and more effective, but there are still a few things it can’t pull off as well as a human. Translation is one of them.
The other day, I stumbled upon a tweet from a British punk music curator who had translated Smash Mouth’s “All-Star” to biblical Aramaic and then back to English. The experiment went about as well as you might imagine. Google Translate discerned the song’s core meaning but lost the nuance and voice in the process of moving it back and forth between languages. What resulted was a bizarrely profound version of the hit single, one that feels more appropriate for a recital in the Sistine Chapel than the opening credits of Shrek.
If you work for an enterprise brand, odds are you care about translation. Brands love to talk about scaling globally. But marketers don’t always know how to scale their content in a way that works out. It’s foolhardy to expect a widget to translate your latest how-to article into Spanish as your brand tries to expand its content efforts.
Instead of hiring a team of five in a new country and allocating significant resources from your budget, starting with content translation can help you understand the details of a new market before investing too much too soon. What you need is a human being to do that translation work for you—but even that process has its own complications.
When a brand scales internationally, good translation is often a necessary addition to its content strategy. But as evidenced…
COMMENTS