Why Consider Translation Services for your Brochures?
Companies, organizations, and programs use brochures to get eye-catching, condensed information quickly to their intended audience, usually to promote services, products, or events. We have extensive expertise in the translation of brochures for different industries such as the finance and insurance industry, health care, nutraceutical, business, travel and tourism, real estate, telemedicine, and more!
There are several reasons why you need to consider not just translation for your brochure, but also localization. Your brochure will be ineffective if:
your audience cannot read the information because of the language barrier
the information sounds foreign or awkward because it uses language that does not fit the region or dialect
the charts and data don’t make any sense because the reader doesn’t understand what they are showing (consider the need to localize measurements such as Fahrenheit to Celsius or feet to meters)
How Language Concepts Can Help
Our team of professionals works frequently with this type of content- highly concise language used for advertising, marketing, or precise information.
We are very aware that to reach audiences at your fullest potential, your content needs to sound natural to them, with the speaker sounding fluent not only in the language but the local dialect and without sounding like a textbook one-to-word translation. Thus, we at Language Concepts offer various ways to arrive at the absolute best new version of your text:
Localization is the adaptation of written content to a specific location, region, or market. Text is full of regionalisms such as local idioms and uses very precise, appropriate dialect to look and feel like that particular market. The localized content reads as if it had been made locally and in-country.
Transcreation often necessitates adaptation or reworking much of the individual words in order to better mirror the overall message. It is a reimagining of the original language’s wording in order to better capture the original meaning in the new, target language without losing meaning. This often involves using idioms and cultural references in the new language, possibly changing names and places, and more in order to make the target language’s message resonate with the target language’s culture. This will make the message feel natural in the target language and not like a piece that was translated from a different original language.
How do Transcreation and Localization Differ? Could My Brochure Need Both?
Localization is more focused on smaller communities within a given language, like tailoring communication to particular regions or dialects. For example, English differs greatly between New Zealand and England, America and Scotland. In a similar way, Spanish differs from region to region across the globe as well. So while localization specifically changes language to blend into those locales, transcreation is more focused on the broader picture of reimagining communication from one language to another. A TV show or marketing campaign might reimagine character names to be more pronounceable and familiar to an audience who speaks the target language, but smaller details like regionally-specific idioms might be left out or traded for broader-spectrum idioms of the target language.
Your brochure could certainly benefit from both, depending on the content and your marketing goals. We offer not only the language services themselves, but are happy to consult with your team and offer our assessment in what types and blends of translation, transcreation, and localization will best match your needs.
Benefits of Localization and Transcreation for my Brochure Content
Can better SEOs (search engine optimization)
Changes measurement units such as currencies, date formats, telephone number formats, imperial versus metric, etc.
Shows your audience and clients that you care to communicate with them fluently in their native language
Builds your credibility as a company
Helps build loyalty as your services or products will resonate better with local audiences
Helps increase your sales
Helps your company be identified as one that is invested in the local community and speaking directly to them and their unique markets, populations, and needs
Avoids potentially offending your audience
What Else does Language Concepts Offer for Brochure Translation?
Brochure translation usually requires the involvement of translators, graphics design experts, proofreaders. You don’t need to hire them individually as we can take care of all aspects of your project and turn around an in-language brochure needed for your specific target audience.
Our graphic design team can help maximize your brochure’s image potential. While you certainly can request for images and layout to remain the same, our team is experienced in maximizing layouts potential and increasing audience interest via precise selection of appealing images. Being mindful about which images will most draw your audience’s eyes and most relate to them can help your brochure appeal to local audiences better just as much as localizing the writing can.
We can even advise you if you need to use different images or colors based on your target audience. For instance, if your brochure in English shows a family attending a baseball event of the children and you need to use the same content for Latin American or the US Hispanic market, your company is better off using a soccer game instead of a baseball game. The tagline and some other small tweaks may be needed too. We will make sure your brochure is appealing for your target audience and resonates with it, such as ensuring you use the correct cultural and ethnicity references. Keep in mind that even colors have different connotations in different countries.
We are also experts at adapting graphics and spaces to fit the translated text into the existing layout. Remember that some languages like German expand when they are translated from English. Others, like Chinese contract on the other hand. We work hand in hand with the client in case we have to adapt and shorten the content without impacting the meaning.
Concluding Thoughts
Especially when you are using brochures to expand and reach a wider audience, you need your brochures to be available and accessible to many so that you can capture the broadest new audience possible. While it may not make financial sense to translate your brochure into every language spoken in your region (in the U.S. currently, the count is at 350 languages spoken across the nation) you can target key markets or demographics easily by looking at the language data about your hopeful new audience.
In the United States, for example, while English is still the most commonly spoken language, “13 percent of the population speaks Spanish at home, earning it the title of the most common non-English language spoken” (Forbes). Therefore, you might decide to translate and print your brochure in English and Spanish. But if you’re expanding to Alaska, did you know there are communities where the primary spoken language is not English but Russian? According to the 2020 U.S. Census, 21.7 % of people in the U.S. speak a language other than English at home.
We can even offer translation from language to language or even hyper-specific localization services as well, such as translating your brochure for a specific community dialect like Chicano (a dialect spoken mainly by people of Mexican ethnic origin in California and the Southwest).
Our professional translation team can help you assess exactly how you can best benefit from our brochure translation services. Whether you are printing your brochures or digitally distributing them, we can help you determine exactly how our language services can best serve you.