Business today is a global affair. If you want to rake in the big bucks, you really need to know how to cater to a multinational market. Because of this, it’s become particularly crucial to ensure that your communication tactics are sound.
If you are an English-speaker, you might think you’ve got your work cut out for you – that’s what you get for natively speaking what is widely considered a lingua franca. The truth of the matter is, however, much more complex, and you can miss out on many opportunities by remaining monolingual.
Just knowing another language may be a step in the right direction, but it’s far from enough. What your business really needs to thrive internationally as a translator. It’s a profession that can really enhance communication in your office, and there are three main areas in which that is crucial for your company.
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Marketing
If you want to sell a product well, you need to make sure it reaches your target. For that, you need the message to be clear and resonate with your potential clients. A translator’s role becomes incredibly crucial, then, as just translating the text into a grammatically correct equivalent is not enough. Marketing materials are often strongly culturally marked, and a professional translator knows how to make the text resonate with your clients on a cultural level.
In the end, what makes content marketing, social media marketing, and any other form of marketing effective is the quality of the content. And good content can’t sound like it was written in another language. With the help of a good translator, you’ll maintain the illusion that all your marketing is written with your potential customers in mind – it shows that you really care.
Operations
This has less to do with your clients and more to do with the internal workings of your company. If you’re a multicultural company with lots of departments spread across the world, you’ll need proper document translations in order to ensure that everyone is on the same page. Whether it’s for recordkeeping, accounting, contracts, or any other form of documentation, ensuring that all documents are translated accurately is not only helpful – it is instrumental in making your business function properly.
These types of documents usually contain very precise information, and translating them requires very specialized knowledge of the terminology in both languages. An inaccurate translation, especially when talking about bookkeeping papers, may even result in substantial financial losses for your company.
Working with other parties
Having a translator on board opens up a lot of possibilities for your business. There are plenty of auditing companies on the global market that will be evaluating yours in order to ensure that you meet the current standards. Failure to comply may result in your business failing the audit and being locked out of the loop.
With a professional translator on board, you don’t have to worry about the small details. Whether it pertains you to importing goods or service agreements with other companies, having all this external documentation translated to you means that you won’t miss a beat and pass everything with flying colours. It will show the other businesses that you’re reliable and trustworthy.
Why even bother?
In this day and age, as borders start becoming less significant and more people sharing a headspace in the form of the internet, it’s really hard to avoid interacting with other cultures, especially if you want to be successful. A professional that really knows their way around the language of this other culture will come a long way in showing the world what your business is really about, what you can give, and how far you are willing to go to connect.
This isn’t even mentioning the fact that by making sure that your company is fully multilingual, you are opening up your company for a much larger talent pool than you would by staying monolingual. A professional translator that will handle all your contracts and other employee documentation will come a long way in making foreign candidates much more accessible to yours. Plus, other than their skill, you can be sure they’ll help broaden your office’s perspective on a lot of things – opening your business like this can only be beneficial.
Don’t be cheap – you’ll actually save more money
Now, if you’ve already decided on a translator for your company, you’ve got two routes – either you hire an external translator on a commission basis, or you’re getting an in-house translator. Both models have their merits, but the important thing is that you need to value your translators because trust us – good translators do value themselves.
While you might think getting a cheaper translator to do work for you is an effective option, the cheaper they are, the less experienced they are, and you run the risk of inaccuracies and mistranslation. Though the cost might seem high at first, the benefits you’ll reap from their input is likely to dwarf any costs involved, and you’ll start gaining real profits soon enough. If you must pick a more cost-effective option of the two, though, an in-house translator will definitely serve you better.
