Five business translation tasks your company has overlooked

If your company’s plan for global success involves trading overseas, professional translation is likely to play a key role in your strategy. Your company website, key marketing brochures and presentation documents will no doubt be top of the list when it comes to liaising with your translation company. Documents such as packaging and leaflets containing product information will not doubt follow suit. However, if you think that’s all of your translation needs taken care of, it’s time to think again! 

Business cards

Our translation company works with companies of all sizes and one translation task that we often find gets overlooked is that of translating business cards. Business card translation can have excellent benefits. It shows those you meet with that you are serious about expanding your operations to incorporate their country. It also ensures they have your contact details to hand in their native language, which is always helpful. 

If you’re put off business card translation by the thought of having to double your costs and print two batches of everything, why not opt for double-sided cards instead? These will keep your printing costs down and avoid wasting resources, so will be better for the environment too. 

Most professional translation agencies can provide desktop publishing services. As such, if you need help with laying out the bilingual version of your business cards, your translation service should be able to assist. 

Employee contracts 

A global empire usually involves employing staff in more than one country – and often in more than one language. For many companies that are new to overseas development, taking on staff abroad involves a number of challenges. One task that is often left to the last minute and then rushed through is the translation of employee contracts. Staff like to sign legal documents in their native language, so be sure to leave time for employment contract translation when you’re planning your global corporate venture. 

Alongside contracts for staff based overseas, it’s also a good idea to translate your employee handbook and/or policies into staff members’ native language(s). After all, how can you expect your team to comply with your policies if they can’t understand them?

Legal disclaimers

A surprising number of companies throw all of their time and energy into translating product information in order to make their website available in multiple languages, while completely overlooking important pages such as those containing legal information. Selling goods and services involves entering into certain commitments and your customers need to understand what those commitments are. As such, part of successful business translation means explaining the extent of your liabilities, and any limitations thereon, to your customers, no matter which country they may be based in. Website messages about how you use cookies, pages not being found and so forth also need to be translated. 

FAQs

Likewise, many companies tend to overlook their FAQs. These can be a valuable source of information to potential and existing customers. Presenting them in the same language(s) that you present marketing and product information can help to boost sales and reduce the amount of time you spend answering customer queries. 

Social media posts

Social media seems to play an ever-increasing role in business marketing. Whether you opt for paid adverts or simply generate your own posts in order to engage customers, think about how you could increase your audience by posting in multiple languages. Remember to translate captions on images you post too, to ensure maximum audience engagement and get the best value from your social media strategy. 

Next steps

Has your company already taken care of all of the above translation tasks? If not, it’s time to act! Feel free to contact the Tomedes team for further advice or to use our instant quote service to price up your translation tasks right away.