Business Translation: How to Make Your Startup Global in 2019

Business Translation: How to Make Your Startup Global in 2019

Business Translation: How to Make Your Startup Global in 2019 3000 1993 Accelingo

Going Global is a Huge Step for Any Startup, and Business Translation is the Best Place to Start

Every startup wants their business to go global but very few have ‘global’ in their budget. Often seed funding and a few more rounds of investment are needed before global can even start to be brought up in meetings.

Think funding is a huge obstacle to taking your startup global? Think again. You don’t need an international office or a team overseas, you just need to be able to connect with the local markets you’re targeting and provide localized services.

How do you connect with your potential new customers overseas? In a language they understand, using business translation and localization.

Connecting With Foreign Markets

According to W3Tech, 54 percent of websites have their content in English but only 25 percent of users online speak English—this is a huge disparity! The 75 percent of users who aren’t being catered for are potential customers you can acquire with very little cost.

One of the major downfalls of content these days is that we are constantly being bombarded with it, making it difficult for startups to define their place in the market and grab their audience’s attention. The opposite is true with foreign markets. There is very little content catering for users of different languages, dramatically reducing your competition.

Putting out high-quality, engaging content that has been translated and localized for your foreign audience’s needs, increases your chance of viewer engaging. Not only can you more easily reach audiences, but content that caters to audiences in their own language has a greater chance of generating a lead or converting a customer, too.

How Do You Start Translating Your Content

So you’re convinced. You want to go global with your startup budget and you think translation is the way to do it, but where do you start?

The first thing you need to do is find someone who does business translation to translate your content. There are a number of options you can go with here such as hire someone in-house, find a freelance, or hire a trusted translation agency. We recommend finding an agency.

Translation agencies will have a network of translators from all over the world, native speakers in the language, or languages, you need, that will ensure you get high-quality translations that stay on brand every single time.

Read More: How to Choose a Translation Company That’s Right for Your International Expansion Strategy

The Process of Translating Your Startup Content

To take your startup global with business translations, it’s not just to pick an agency and hand everything off. You need to learn the process of translating business content so you can ensure that you get top-quality content that means foreign audiences will keep coming back to your site time and time again.

The process for creating business translations usually goes something like this:

  1. Project Analysis
  2. Glossary & Style Guide Creation
  3. Translation, Editing & Proofreading
  4. Client Review
  5. Formatting & Layout
  6. Quality Control & Delivery
  7. Client Feedback

Knowing what to expect helps you ensure that you get the highest quality translations possible. It’s more than just a word-for-word translation, you need to know that content will match the tone of voice of your company, and has been translated in a way that makes efficient use of words, and speaks in a way that your audience will be expecting.

If you have not had translations created for your business before when you get started, it can seem a little overwhelming, especially if you don’t speak the language you are translating to. Following the steps in the process above means you know exactly what is happening and can trust that you are getting the top quality you paid for.

Don’t Just Translate—Localize to Better Connect with Your Audience

To take your startup global, you have to do more than just word-for-word translations of the content you already have. You need to put yourself in the shoes of your foreign audience. Things your native customers appreciate might not appeal as much to foreign audiences, and words you use might not have the same context once translated.

Creating business translations that are localized means they will have the biggest impact possible on the audience you’re targeting. Consumers that are not native English speakers appreciate the effort that startups make to translate content and this appreciation is only increased when it is further localized.

Small gestures like mentioning things in the local area, habits that people from that area often have, or using phrases or colloquial language go a long way in building trust with new global audiences and establishing your startup as a business that cares about its customers.

In the ever-connected world we live in, connecting with global audiences is becoming easier than ever. While most of the world has a way to find access to the internet, the variety of content for non-native English speakers is severely lacking. Using business translation and localization can be one of the most effective ways for startups to break into foreign markets and acquire new customers at a low cost and without establishing a base in that area.

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