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We believe that translation is an important part of achieving your goals and we work with a highly experienced and creative team.
We can localise your content in light of your audience’s cultural and sociological context. We enlist linguists who translate exclusively into their mother tongue and who are in close touch with daily life in their country.
In addition to localising your websites, we can
translate landing pages, social media posts and
white papers. We offer tools in place that
enable you to talk quickly with our head
linguists.
This process is deeper than translation, it is called “transcreation”. Our linguists, who specialise in marketing by business sector, must get to know your tone, your language and your world, so they can grasp all the nuances and subtleties, and render them in a way that hits the mark.
We can adapt and tailor the content that we translate to the platforms where you will publish it. We can handle your multilingual page setting (DTP), adapt your words to voice-over or subtitles (audio/video) and take care of your web interfaces.
Send us your translation project for a quote.
We will get back to you within an hour (during office hours).
Everyone is rooted in a given culture and social environment. Your campaigns’ target audiences have their own idioms, metaphors and puns that relate to a context that should be known and understood.
Cultural nuance is difficult to translate and could lead to confusion. It can create readability issues for your product and worse, make it undesirable.
With this in mind, you know that instead of translating literally, the content should be adapted to the local culture in order to convey the spirit of the original message. This is where localisation and transcreation can really work their magic.
And while culture helps set tone (for example, English speakers are usually more informal and use short, punchy sentences), the same goes for sociological considerations. Your target audience’s age and socio-professional group should also be taken into account. You naturally adjust the way you phrase your message depending on your audience — for instance a twenty-year-old student or a sixty-year-old executive.
Our translators, who are used to juggling our clients’ business strategies, know how to adapt the content to your goals. We are quick to invest a lot of time at the start of the business relationship by asking you about key issues. It is essential for us to understand your stance, your values and your overall communication strategy, as well as your view of your market and your strategic goals, in order to translate your requirements into a language guide for the translators. We try to gather as much feedback as possible from you, so we can gradually integrate more subtle elements and make sure that you recognise your brand in the translated texts.
To meet the flexibility and responsiveness required for certain marketing projects and particularly for your digital content marketing strategy, news articles, blogs, social media posts, landing pages, white papers (see our article on the white papers) and website updates, etc., Version internationale has a specific system in place for responding to recurring low-volume requests. This allows you to simplify your digital marketing campaigns by managing regular content as and when it’s created.
We offer an adapted system that harnesses readily available linguists and lean administrative management to save you time. With this flexible system, you can increase the amount of multilingual content you publish, with complete peace of mind.
Finally, we assign a stable team of specific linguists to each client, which enables translators to absorb the writing style of each type of content and to guarantee consistency.
Linguistic consistency is essential whatever the project. However, it is all the more essential in marketing translation, as the brand’s identity and the language that goes with it are key to gaining the support of your target audience. The words are not plucked out of thin air in the source version or in the target version.
Our client is an American software publisher that sells the leading software in purchasing and expense management. To make the software attractive and help it stand out, the company chose to prioritise quality writing for its content and editorial guidelines. Well-crafted language, short and catchy sentences that say it all in few words: the English version, despite being very elaborate, seem simple. The website was designed with the English text in mind, favouring short, accessible blocks of text below illustrative icons. We therefore had to retain a similar tone in French, despite the French language having 20% more words than English and tending to use more detailed expressions. Another major challenge was managing to fully convey the intent of the English text and the software options offered so that the buyer immediately understood the product’s benefits and how it works.
This long-term project lasted several months. Some of the texts were translated (high-quality marketing translation in three stages: translation by a translator specialising in marketing, followed by editing and style improvements by a second specialised translator, and final proofreading to approve the content) and others were transcreated. Our client chose to invest in transcreation for its website content in order to have a perfectly localised version on its online shopfront, which was its main sales platform. We put together a dedicated team of linguists and appointed a head linguist for this project. This head linguist met with the client’s French sales teams, so they could really soak up the vocabulary used in the sales team’s day-to-day work. They also attended a major sales meeting that brought together the sales teams and clients. This stage of immersing yourself in the company is key, yet sadly increasingly rare. It enabled the head linguist to acquire in-depth knowledge of the software and to understand who the clients were and the company’s sales pitch. Over three months, the head linguist supervised the team handling the translation and transcreation. A professional transcreator reworked the previously translated texts extensively so that the French version followed the client’s editorial guidelines perfectly.
The result:
Our client, a renowned communications agency and the subsidiary of a leading global group, manages press relations for major IT companies in France. These highly proactive companies publish very frequent press releases on acquisitions, new commercial partnerships and innovative product launches.
These press releases follow precise rules, both in terms of style and form, and are usually written in English by the communications department. Our client needs these press releases to be translated into the leading language of each of the markets in which the companies operate.
Translating press releases mainly from English to French for different organisations involves adopting a specific style for each business while respecting very tight deadlines. On the one hand, our linguists must have a solid grasp of each company’s environment, products and various solutions, but they must also incorporate the vocabulary, or jargon, specific to each company.
For each of the companies it manages communications for, our client sent us a very detailed brief. From there, our in-house team selected a pool of translators who are both specialists in the IT field and also have an excellent writing style.
To translate the press releases sent by the communication agency almost immediately, we need to constantly maintain a certain flexibility in our production schedule and when rallying our resources. Throughout the year, Version internationale handles around ten press releases per week just for this communication agency. This way, we make it possible to publish the press releases without delay, so they are perfectly in sync with each company’s news updates in the French market.
This internationally renowned airline wants to encourage its customers to travel by publishing cultural articles about the main tourist destinations it flies to around the world. They showcase a new destination each week. The text is written in English and must then be translated as quickly as possible, so it can be published the following week on the company’s website.
It involves translating around ten articles every week at short notice but for the best value for money.
These marketing texts must sound like they have been written in the target language and not like they have been translated. However, since they are ephemeral articles, they also need to fall within a small budget.
Finally, production must be fine-tuned, as there is no room for delay, even at times when our in-house or external translators are unavailable.
We put together a team of translators who work on these texts on a recurring basis. The linguistic team understands the tone to use (which helps to make the style consistent week after week) and the translation requirements. A set of reference documents (guidelines, glossaries, termbase, reference material) was compiled to ensure consistent and high-quality translations week after week. Thanks to this flawless system, Version internationale was able to deliver translated articles that had been adapted to our client’s audience. By delivering ready-to-publish articles, we saved our client a time-consuming proofreading phase, and they were able to meet their publication deadlines. The client is completely satisfied and has been able to strengthen its market positions by working on marketing content.
Send us your translation project for a quote.
We will get back to you within an hour (during office hours).