Professional German Translation for Marketing Documents

Transcreation in Business and Marketing Document Translation Services

When someone looks at your brochures, business cards or flyers,your business reputation is on the line. While it would be an overstatement to say that your whole business could be ruined with a spelling or grammar error or two, it certainly doesn't do you or your business any favors. When your marketing materials undergo English to German translation, are you verifying their accuracy before passing them out to your Austrian audience? How do you know if they say what they should say, not only in regards to cultural appropriateness, but according to your brand and message? Even a slight variation on a slogan can send a completely different message in another language and culture. Are you sure that your slogan conveys your brand consistently from language to language, and culture to culture, in a professional translation? How careful are you about which professional translation company you use? 

Last month, one of our clients - a high end German retail apparel company - needed our help with business translation of their smaller marketing documents: business cards, small catalog text, and some other direct marketing materials. This is not the only retail company - or apparel company - we have assisted with a professional business translation, and certainly won't be the last. After evaluating the target market, in this case, UK catalog subscribers as well as retail outlets throughout Great Britain and Ireland, our German translators used a mix of marketing transcreation and standard business translation services, in order to produce appropriate marketing messages equivalent to their German origins. As a little reminder, transcreation is a type of translation service that translates creative concepts, messages and non-literal language or themes. Transcreation is demanded by most larger marketing firms or corporate campaigns. Pepsi had a snafu which is an illustration of what happens when corporate marketing authorities did not use transcreation service to properly convey one of their past slogans: "Come Alive with the Pepsi Generation." In an English to Chinese translation of the slogan - one that quite obviously ignored the purpose of transcreation - the Chinese equivalent said "Pepsi makes your ancestors come back from the dead." When not a single Chinese ancestor popped in for dinner, Chinese Pepsi drinkers realized the slogan was a translation mistake.

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Transcreation of marketing materials can require a team of anywhere from 4 to 20 translators depending on the amount of material to be translated. Not enough translators can not only delay the turn around time, but the risk of inaccuracy and oversight is amplified. Too many translators for your professional German translation may seem like a good idea in order to get a fast turnaround - however, this can not only have the opposite affect, but it makes translators unhappy as well - and we are committed to our translators just as our clients. This is why each client is provided with his or her own linguistic project account manager, who assigns and supervises the translation process from start to finish, making sure it stays on task, on target and on time.

Translation Service Perfectionism Through Extensive Proofreading

After the translation is completed by our translators, we have several levels of quality assurance in order to guarantee professional translation accuracy for our clients. Depending upon the length, language translation pairs, time frame and other factors for a given project, it can undergo up to three cycles of translation proofreading and accuracy checks, especially for something that can have linguistic and cultural variables like marketing and transcreation services. So next time you ask yourself, "How do I know my stuff says what it's supposed to say in this German translation? or likewise, "How do I know this German to English translation is telling me what it really says in German?" -well, you'll have a solid answer: Our translations are proofread three times, by three different sets of translators - that's how. Even if you would send a professional German translation supplied by us to another translation company for proofreading, there would be fewer pairs of eyes and minds checking for errors.

However, we encourage you to to ahead and have our translations proofread by another professional translation agency, should you have any doubts about the perfectionism in our deliverables.