All posts by : Becca

Thanks to the stratospheric rise of the internet, the world has never been more connected – and the opportunities for globalisation have never been greater. Online presence is now a prerequisite for most businesses, and is indispensable for any brand that sets its sights beyond local borders.

But while the internet makes it possible to reach potential customers around the world, it also exposes businesses to a much bigger audience, making it critical to get your branding, messaging and user experience right for any market you are targeting.

The importance of localising your online presence

Research has backed up what most of us probably know instinctively – that potential customers are much more likely to buy from a website that’s available in their own language. And while online tools have made it possible for users to automatically translate websites into a language they speak, this isn’t enough if you want to gain customers and win conversions. Not only is the quality of automatic translation generally not high enough to convince potential customers of the quality of your brand, it’s also limited to the purely linguistic elements of a website. If you want to succeed in international markets, it’s critical to consider the broader elements of UX localisation and remove as many barriers as possible in the way of potential customers making purchases. This could include converting currencies, units of measurement, clothes sizes and times and dates for your target locale, as well as localising colours, music, images, symbols and a whole host of other culturally specific features on your website.

Branding and tone of voice

Another aspect of your online presence to consider is your branding strategy. If you’re selling your products or services internationally, it’s important to think about how you’ll create a feeling of consistency with the overall global brand while still making your product feel like it was created in and for the target culture.

Alternatively, some brands opt to retain elements of the culture in which they originated for their perceived value. An example of this is Audi’s highly successful slogan “Vorsprung durch Technik”, used in the UK and USA as well as Germany. Keeping this catchphrase in German means it’s imbued with positive connotations about German efficiency and high-quality engineering.

Another example of the use of a product’s exotic “foreignness” to sell in international markets is the recent advertising campaign for Peroni Nastro Azzurro’s new lager Stile Capri, which centres on the concept “The Taste That Takes You There”. The UK TV advert shows a couple wearing swimsuits and sunglasses and drinking Nastro Azzurro beer on sun loungers in what we first assume to be Italy’s Amalfi Coast, before it becomes clear that they are in fact sitting outside a British garden centre. Italian cultural signifiers, including the product name and the Italian soundtrack, are used to add a sense of glamour and prestige to the product, while the everyday Britishness of the setting encourages viewers to imagine the drink fitting into their daily lives. These examples are a great demonstration of how brands can get it right when it comes to international branding, both online and offline.

SEO

SEO localisation is another crucial part of any internalisation campaign. This involves using keywords to optimise the contents of a website in order to increase traffic via organic search results in a given language or region. When done correctly, SEO localisation can help businesses increase their visibility when potential customers use search engines to look for related terms, increase the amount of time that visitors spend looking at their website and reach customers in a specific region in a more targeted way.

SEO localisation best practices include carrying out careful keyword research to ensure that you capture the most commonly searched terms and best matches for your offering within the target region, ensuring that you translate your website content accordingly, including meta titles, tags and descriptions, and inserting key words in a strategic way.

Social media

When it comes to social media, it’s vitally important to know your target audience and to stay on top of current trends, hashtags and buzzwords while maintaining a consistent and authentic presence. Social media is all about authenticity, community and interactivity, and therefore requires a very different approach from website localisation, for example. In addition to creating content in the language of your target audience, a successful social media strategy will identify a detailed customer avatar for the target segment, carry out careful research into the types of content that this customer is likely to engage with, and then maintain consistent visuals and tone of voice, incorporating local issues, cultural references and trending hashtags in order to build connections with potential and existing customers.

ecls’ expertise

It’s clear that creating an internationally successful online presence is a complex undertaking with a huge number of considerations and nuances. Fortunately, help is at hand. At ecls translations, we have a team of cultural and linguistic experts with detailed knowledge of specific languages, cultures and regions as well as significant experience in localisation.

Examples of areas where we have recently helped businesses expand internationally via their online presence include localising search ads, creating target language social media posts, translating newsletters, email campaigns, blog posts and product descriptions, transcreation services, localisation of landing pages and much more.

As well as translation, localisation and transcreation, we offer a cultural consultancy service provided by native speakers of the relevant target language. As a result, we can help with both upper and lower funnel marketing and support your brand to create an authentic online presence that is consistent with your global brand image, allowing you to reach new potential customers and ultimately boost your international sales.

Let’s secure your success in global markets together.

“Times and conditions change so rapidly that we must keep our aim constantly focused on the future.”

–Walt Disney

Times are changing, and we’re changing with them…

Our clients’ industries are undergoing a period of rapid change – as is our language services industry, with AI offering new possibilities for customers, translators and project managers alike. Many Language Service Providers are evolving and adding new services to their roster in light of new technologies, opportunities and demands.

As a boutique agency, ecls translations is perfectly placed to anticipate our clients’ requirements and respond to the changing landscape in a dynamic and agile way, and we are continuing to launch new services.

Our work as translation professionals really is unrecognisable from just a few short years ago. See the below table for a summary of our newest services on offer and, more importantly, the range of benefits our clients enjoy.

Transferable skills – technical writing

Our translators have a wealth of training and experience in critical skills including research, writing and adapting texts for our clients’ audiences, as well as subject matter expertise in the fields of technology, automotive and manufacturing. As a team, we are also always eager to seek out opportunities for development, training and growth to anticipate and respond to our clients’ ever-evolving needs.

When an opportunity recently arose to launch a new technical writing service, we jumped at the chance. There are countless affinities between technical translation and technical writing: both involve careful research, terminology management, and transforming sometimes complex information into clear and easily understandable text for target readers. For our client, we were able to use these well-honed skills to help create a knowledge base for customer service advisors at a company offering a corporate reward scheme. This involved absorbing and summarising a huge amount of information in an accessible way to ensure that call centre advisors can find the answers they need in an instant. This helped improve customer satisfaction and also contributed to a huge cost saving, as the knowledge base created has been designed for end customers too to reference and self-train on navigating the system and its multitude of features.

A further service we’re now offering in line with demand is the technical writing of software documentation. We’ve found this isn’t usually a well-loved task among software engineers, which is where our linguistic experts come in. We’re able to take complex concepts and ‘translate’ them into easy-to-understand language for target readers, contributing to greater ease of use and higher user acceptance (before any multilingual translation then comes into play).

Beyond marketing translation

As a team, we have decades of experience as marketing translators, and we are increasingly applying this industry-specific knowledge to other, related areas. This is in line with developments across the language services industry, where specialist marketing translators and agencies are using their industry insights and expertise to offer wider marketing-related services, including the following:

• Multilingual copywriting
• Multilingual SEO research and translation
• Digital marketing and campaign performance management
• Content testing and analysis
• International brand management
• Social media management
• Cultural consulting
• Website localisation and
• Creative strategy.

At ecls translations, we have begun working in several of these areas, including a recent creative strategy and international brand management project that involved using our cultural expertise to evaluate several slogans that our client was considering as part of their expansion to new country-specific markets. Such services are increasingly crucial in a world where getting it wrong can go viral – and not in a good way – costing companies a great deal in terms of both money and reputation. Getting it right, however, with a nuanced understanding of the culture and values of the target market, means setting yourself up for success when breaking into new territories, boosting international sales and winning new clients around the world.

New technologies breed new expertise

One of the biggest factors transforming the face of both the language services and marketing industries and beyond is the stratospheric rise of AI. This has created demand for new skills and services upstream and downstream of the AI output. For example, our team has worked on preparing training data sets for machine learning. This step is crucial to ensuring that AI models are fed with high-quality, accurate input data and thereby optimising their output from the start.

At the other end of the process, human post-editing of generative AI copy is also essential, and counters the risk of AI “hallucinations” – false, inaccurate or illogical results. For the past three years, we have been involved in the post-editing of keywords and Adwords for the world’s largest multi-national technology company, helping their end clients boost global sales. A more recent service we offer involves working as “raters”, which involves assessing AI-generated sentences against one another, highlighting errors and assigning a quality score to help train the system and ultimately improve output.

The outlook

Times are changing, and we’re changing with them. We’ve already been able to help countless clients rise to the challenge of internationalisation with our multifaceted localisation services, while new technologies allow us to streamline our processes and offer an even smoother, faster service for our customers as well as to cater for all types of deadline and budget.

We’re also excited to have joined the Magic Beans Tech Club in August 2024, which brings together representatives from Language Service Providers around the world with the aim of knowledge exchange, sharing best practice and working to stay at the cutting edge of technology to better serve our customers now and in the years to come.

What is inclusive language?

Inclusive language means using words carefully to acknowledge diversity and ensure that no one is alienated from your communications. It’s a respectful way of engaging with every member of your audience, particularly marginalised individuals and groups. It means avoiding bias and not making assumptions about gender, race, ethnicity, ability or sexuality.

Inclusive language isn’t just a “nice to have”; it’s critical to connecting with your target market. Failing to be inclusive with your communications means that you are likely to lose many potential customers from the get-go – not only under-recognised* groups, but also younger people and anyone else attuned to issues of equality and inclusion.

More broadly, inclusive language is a way to effect real change in the world. Language is power, and it shapes our cognition. The more we hear stereotypes reinforced through language, the more we’re likely to believe them. Conversely, inclusive language chips away at implicit bias and contributes to making our world more accepting, equitable and tolerant. If that sounds like something you’d like to be a part of, read on!

Inclusive language, translation and added value

Attitudes and approaches to issues of inclusion vary between cultures and languages. What’s acceptable in one country might come across as outdated, insensitive or downright offensive in another, so it’s crucial to get it right when you’re targeting an international audience.

At ecls translations, we don’t just convert words from one language to another. Instead, we spend time carefully analysing the source text and crafting a message in the target language that will truly resonate with the intended audience. This means that if we come across something in a source text that won’t sit well with a target market in terms of its inclusivity, we’ll flag this up to you and suggest some possible adaptations rather than simply translating word for word.

It’s important to remember that language is constantly evolving, and what might be the inclusive term today could cause offence in the future. That’s why we ensure that we are always up to date with cultural and linguistic changes to remain as inclusive as possible.

Inclusive language around the world

Just as attitudes to inclusivity vary around the world, so do linguistic strategies of inclusion. This is a vast and complex area, but let’s take a brief look at some of the hot topics in the three main languages in which ecls translations specialises: English, French and German.

In the UK, identity politics is currently a hotly debated issue. Regardless, gender inclusivity is becoming more and more important, with many individuals and institutions recognising that gender is not binary, for example by implementing a policy of stating preferred personal pronouns (such as she/her, he/him, they/them, ze, sie and xim). The UK’s National Health Service has also begun to adopt gender-neutral language, so that, for example, you might see information for an expectant parent referring to “birthing person” instead of “mother” and “chestfeeding” instead of “breastfeeding”.

In terms of race and ethnicity, there’s a movement towards using the term “global majority” rather than “ethnic minority” to describe people who are Black, Asian, Brown, dual-heritage, indigenous to the global south, in recognition of the fact that these groups represent some 80% of the world's population. If you’d like to explore these issues in greater depth, inclusive language guides are a great starting point – for example, a guide to writing about ethnicity published by the UK Government can be found here, while a guide to writing about disability is available here.

In France, language is a famously political issue. The Académie Française was established in 1634 to protect the “purity” of the French language, and even today it plays an important role in deciding what’s “correct” in terms of grammar, spelling and vocabulary. However, it’s often seen as old-fashioned and out of step with the times: recently, it has criticised the use of trendy anglicisms such as “big data” and “drive-through” in public life. More controversially, the Académie has also opposed attempts to make French more gender-neutral. One topic to come under fire is the inclusive neologism “iel”– a gender-neutral pronoun that combines the masculine “il” and the feminine “elle”. However, the debate also extends to the structure of the language itself. As French is a grammatically gendered language, speakers generally need to specify either the masculine or feminine version of occupations and pronouns – for example, “le traducteur”/”la traductrice”. Many people see this as problematic because when gender is unknown or unclear, or when a group of people are referred to, the default is the masculine, which arguably reinforces patriarchal ideology and erases women and people of other genders.

Various strategies have been developed to get round this and make the language more gender-neutral and inclusive. One of these is the use of an interpoint (∙) or other symbol to combine the masculine form of a noun phrase with feminine suffixes, known as a truncated doublet – for example, “Les traducteur∙rices sont actif∙ves”. The Académie Française has decried such constructions as a sign that French is in mortal danger, while the French Sénat has voted for an extensive ban on gender-inclusive writing. Admittedly, such constructions are perhaps a little difficult to read, and don’t work well when spoken out loud, but there are also alternative solutions such as full doublets (“les traducteurs et les traductrices”) and the use of epicene terms, which are gender-neutral – for example, “la direction” rather than “le directeur/la directrice”.

The picture with the German language is similar – as another grammatically gendered language, German also has the same challenge that gender usually has to be specified when you’re talking about someone’s occupation or other characteristics. Faced with the gender-non-specific term “the teacher”, for example, a translator from English to German would have to decide whether to translate this as “der Lehrer” (male teacher) or “die Lehrerin” (female teacher). Just as with French, the generic masculine has historically been the automatic choice in German in cases where gender is unknown or mixed. This means that when talking about a group of people – even a group of 99 women and one man – the masculine plural would conventionally be used (“die Ärzte” (male doctors) rather than “die Ärztinnen” (female doctors).

To get round this, a range of strategies have been deployed since the 1980s, from the “gender gap” – “die Student_innen” – to the use of a capital “I” – “die StudentInnen”. However, these attempts to make the language inclusive were largely limited to academics and subcultural groups until the last decade, when the “Gendersternchen” (gender star or asterisk) – “die Student*innen” – began to go mainstream, becoming the standard style for many schools, universities and institutions, including some governmental bodies. Nevertheless, there has been pushback from conversative groups in Germany: the right-wing populist party Alternative für Deutschland has campaigned against gender-inclusive language, while the Christian Democrat government in Saxony has banned the use of gender-inclusive language such as gender stars in schools. Other, less polarising options include doubling up (“die Lehrer und die Lehrerinnen”) and non-gendered synonyms (such as “die Lehrkraft” (teaching staff) instead of “die Lehrer/Lehrerinnen).

In 2021, eight German news agencies in Germany, Austria and Switzerland announced a range of measures to avoid linguistic gender bias, including putting women first in constructions such as “Leserinnen und Leser” (female readers and male readers), but stopped short of recommending the use of the gender asterisk or other novel orthographic strategies.

Inclusive language: the way forward

Whatever language you’re communicating in, it’s vital to pay attention to inclusivity to avoid alienating people and to reflect the diversity of your audience. The wide range of strategies might seem bewildering, which is why working with a professional translation agency like ecls translations can be invaluable in helping you find the right approach. As experts in the language and culture of your target audience, we can help you navigate the benefits and drawbacks of different approaches to find the perfect solution based on your target audience, the purpose of your communications and the tone of voice you want to achieve.

*We have deliberately used the term “under-recognised” rather than “under-represented”. For the rationale behind this, see https://hbr.org/2023/04/why-we-should-stop-saying-underrepresented.

Since the first experiments with machine translation in the 1950s, attempts to create a “fully automatic high-quality machine translation system” have been met with hopes as well as fears. Debates around the possibility of replacing human translators with computers go to the very heart of what language is – and what it is to be human. While for decades there’s been an undercurrent of anxiety in the translation industry that human translators might one day become obsolete, this hasn’t happened yet…Why is this, and why do professional human translators continue to outperform computers at almost every level? In this article, we’ll take a look at what machine translation is and how it works, the benefits and drawbacks of machine translation, and how to weigh up whether you need professional human translation, machine translation or a combination of the two for your localisation strategy.

What is machine translation and how does it work?

As the name suggests, machine translation is translation of a text from one language to another, performed automatically (and practically instantaneously) by a computer. There are several types of machine translation, but the main types used today rely on a large number of pre-existing translations arranged as parallel texts, known as a “corpus”. The computer analyses this corpus to find the probability that a certain string of words in the source language (called an “n-gram”) will be translated with a given string of words in the target language, choosing the most likely combination as its final translation. More recently, neural machine translation tools have been developed that have the ability to “learn” and improve their performance as time goes by. Note that “computer-assisted translation” isn’t the same as machine translation: this refers to a range of software tools used by human translators to ensure consistency and efficiency.

What are the benefits and drawbacks of machine vs human translation?

Computers can translate large volumes of text within seconds, so when speed is your main priority, machine translation is hard to beat. The pace at which a human translator is able to translate varies depending on factors such as the complexity of the text, but on average a professional will translate around 2000–2500 words a day. This also means that machine translation generally costs less, because even when you factor in a “machine translation post-editing” stage (known as MTPE, a check carried out by a human translator), the overall time taken to reach the final translation is considerably reduced.

On the other hand, because machine translation relies on a corpus, the quality of the translations it produces depend on the quality of the corpus. This also means that it will replicate any biases in the corpus, potentially leading to issues such as sexism in the translation output. For example, if you take a gender-non-specific term such as “the doctor” in English and use a popular machine translation engine to translate it into Italian, you get “il dottore”, the male doctor. Do the same thing with “the nurse” and you get “l’infermiera”, the female nurse. Problematic, right?

Another problem with the corpus-based approach of machine translation is the fact that it relies on frequency of terms and phrases, which means that the computer will struggle with anything novel or niche. Creative language, neologisms, or unusual technical terminology are all significant stumbling blocks for machine translation. Once again, we can use a well-known free machine translation tool to illustrate this: take the catchphrase from the TV show RuPaul’s Drag Race, “condragulations” – a play on the words “congratulations” and “drag”. Google translates this into Russian as “pozdravleniya”, which is simply the usual word for “congratulations” and has none of the humour, creativity or wordplay of the source text. The human translators who create the Russian subtitles for the show, in contrast, have come up with the perfect solution: “pozdragliayu”. In more technical fields, a human translator specialising in the relevant field will have the background knowledge to know exactly which word to use to translate a niche term, unlike a machine translation engine trained on general texts, which is likely to use entirely the wrong term or not be able to provide a solution at all.

Machine translation also lacks what we call “common sense”, which means it sometimes comes up with some nonsensical – and often amusing – translations. To give a real-life example, we recently edited a machine translation where the German word “Kater” had been translated as both “male cat” and “hangover” in the same text. Both valid translations in some situations, but not in content related to veterinary medicine! This wouldn’t cause any issues for a human translator, who would instantly know which word to use based on the context, but the statistics-based machine translation tool is prone to mixing terms up given that it has no real-world knowledge or understanding of the bigger picture.

What does the future hold?

Despite the issues we’ve described, machine translation is here to stay – and is likely to become a key part of the toolkit of many international companies in future, thanks to its speed and low cost. Used wisely, it can be a brilliant way to lift barriers to international communication at scale. While human involvement is still needed in most cases, the level of intervention depends on a number of factors, including the characteristics of the source text, the quality of the machine translation tool and the purpose of the final translation.

In a similar way, generative AI is already widely used outside the realm of translation and localisation, for example for content writing, website and app design and support chatbots. As with machine translation, human input is still needed in the majority of cases, particularly where anything non-routine, critical or complex is involved. As a result, new services are emerging such as post-editing of AI-generated copywriting.

Only time can tell how the interaction between machines and humans will develop, but the possibilities of this emerging field are certainly exciting. At ecls translations, we have years of experience in leveraging the potential of machine translation while deploying the strengths of a team of specialist human translators, so we’re perfectly placed to advise you on the best approach for your unique business needs in a rapidly changing environment.

Human translation or machine translation?

There are certainly times when machine translation is a useful and appropriate solution: when you need to get the gist of a text in a foreign language, for example, or when you need a fast translation of a straightforward, non-specialist text. While we would always recommend getting a professional translator to check machine translations for accuracy, they can be a great, fast and affordable option in the right circumstances, offering a way to translate large volumes of text at speed. If this sounds like something you might be interested in, we offer a machine translation post-editing service that is a quick and cost-effective solution while still offering the peace of mind that a professional human translator brings in terms of accuracy.

However, if you need to translate a technically complex, creative or humorous text, we would usually recommend working with a human translator. This is also the case for documents with legal validity or anything intended for high-visibility publication. Our team of professional human translators are selected for their specialist experience and knowledge and can be trusted to create high-quality, accurate and fluent translations that will resonate with your target audience.

Whether you’ve decided which service you need and want a quote, or you’re still not sure whether you need a human translator, we’d be delighted to talk you through the options: just get in touch with the ecls team at info@ecls-translations.com.