As you scale your business, there will come a time when reaching an American, British, and other English-speaking audience isn't enough for growth. You’ll need to expand globally to reach new multilingual audiences.
The problem is that sales translations can be costly and challenging to manage and don’t always effectively communicate persuasive points.
But this doesn't have to be your story. You can grow your company and sell your product to multilingual audiences just as effectively as you do in your native language.
Let’s take a look at the strategy you should implement to achieve high-quality sales translations at a fraction of the cost.
The impact of translation on sales
Sales is as much a craft as it is an art form. You need to know each audience’s motivations, needs, hesitations, and leanings.
It’s hard enough to do that in your native language. But what about for a Danish, Russian, Norwegian, or Vietnamese audience? You might as well say you’re learning rocket science.
Each country has its own rich, diverse culture that comes with its own nuances and complexities. You might say, “Drive a car you love and can afford” in your language, but in another, the audience might perceive your automotive translation as “drive a cheap car” and associate your product with poor quality. This is precisely what happened to the Tata Nano in India.
Innovative sales translations in all industries need to accommodate complex cultures by considering the differences between multilingual audiences. But how can they effectively do this?
Translations that connect: Effectively reaching a global audience
Personalized and culture-specific sales translations should consistently generate conversions through all contact points in the buyer’s journey. For example, you should create high-quality translations of your marketing and sales materials, such as website landing pages, brochures, sales letters, Facebook and Google ads, and email sales funnels.
But reaching global audiences, whether they speak Arabic, Portuguese, or Spanish, doesn’t end with translations.
Have you ever been to a non-English-speaking country and read something that someone translated from the local language into English? This translation may have gotten the point across, but it likely confused you, too. In the same way, inaccurate translations can confuse potential customers and lose you the sale.
For example, in one story reported to Smartling, a customer visited a restaurant in Madrid, opened the menu, and noticed a translation of “aged steak” that instead said “old beef” in English. As you can imagine, that didn’t sound too appetizing. It wasn’t until he flipped the menu over to read it in Spanish that he understood what the dish really was. Awkward translations like this one can make a brand feel foreign and unpersonalized.
How do you solve these issues? Using Google Translate won’t cut it. Improved multilingual sales starts with localization—when brands adapt a brand message and experience to the target audience’s culture. Linguists can also implement transcreation to provide additional cultural context so the audience fully understands the message.
We’ll learn why cultural sensitivities matter and how localization makes a difference in the next section.
Overcoming challenges in sales translation
No matter what language you translate your content into—whether it’s French, Mandarin Chinese, or Hindi—you’ll inevitably encounter cultural depth, expectations, and diversity. It can seem almost impossible to scale your business when you have to localize all your sales materials for dozens of people groups.
Below are some of the challenges you’ll face and how you can overcome them:
1. Cultural sensitivity
Often, sales teams have already considered their audience’s sensitivities. After all, they’re masters of navigating relationships, finding buyer needs, and landing the sale. However, something as simple as a mistranslation can ruin all their hard work and expertise.
That’s what happened to Parker Pen when it targeted a Mexican audience in Latin America. In one of the company’s ads, which showed how its non-leaking pens help users avoid awkward embarrassments, the ad used the Spanish word embarazar (to impregnate), thinking it meant “to embarrass.” This was definitely embarrassing for the brand! The error offended the company’s audience and discredited its brand, making sales much harder.
You can avoid these kinds of blunders if you enlist the help of expert translators who are both native speakers and local experts. These are the kinds of linguists Smartling employs and the reason why we’re able to offer a 100% quality guarantee.
But there’s also the localization issue. In other words, you need to be able to fully adapt content for a local audience, whether that’s as a result of a recent political upset, shifting cultural trends, or nuances that tie into generations of history.
Expert linguists come in handy here, too—they can translate sales content in a way that comes across as intimate and local, not foreign. This equips your sales team to meet audiences on a highly relevant and credible level when it’s time to close deals with prospects and leads.
2. Brand consistency
Another common issue that businesses need to resolve is consistency across translations. A company might train bilingual employees who are already on their team, but this can result in employee burnout and low-quality content since not every native speaker is an expert linguist. The differences in output quality, brand voices, and materials can also create a confusing sales experience for potential customers.
Internal translations from existing employees come with risks. (Source)
You may have a professional translation team, but they might create translations that don’t align with your brand. As a result, multilingual audiences who speak Korean, German, Japanese, Italian, or other languages will get an entirely different experience than your English-speaking audience.
This is where dynamic linguistic assets come into play. An up-to-date glossary and style guide go a long way in ensuring that brand messaging and tone stay consistent across content, even if you work with several different translators. Translation memory also allows them to reuse approved terminology at scale—which results in cost savings.
3. Personalization to close the sale
Sales hinge on relationships—there’s no other way to put it. Your sales team has to listen to their leads, solve their problems, and offer a solution that improves prospects’ lives. This experience should be as personal as possible to help your company land more sales.
But that can’t happen with foreign-sounding, impersonal sales translations. Instead, you can segment your audiences and provide clear and highly relevant translated sales experiences that are as authentic as your original versions.
You need localized translations in order to sell your products, whether you’re sending a cold email in Dutch or a sales offer in Greek. Using Smartling’s Language Services and machine translation (MT) technology, you can quickly translate your content and include customized details and solutions for your leads.
4. High costs for traditional translation processes
A decade ago, a sales representative would’ve read this article and thought, “Yeah, but how much is this gonna cost?” Thankfully, we don’t live in that kind of world anymore.
Before, you would have to pay human linguists to translate sales content, which is a long, time-consuming process. The workflow would also produce repeated and avoidable errors that increased costs. Now, MTs and human expertise have paved the way for scalability.
With Smartling’s AI-powered human approach, sales departments can produce affordable, fast, and highly accurate translations.
Smartling also provides automatic quality checks in its translation management system, which expert linguists can use to verify and localize content. Professional translators can then add phrases and terms to translation memory to inform future translations. All this saves you both time and money in the long term.
Enhancing your sales strategy with Smartling
Smartling is the all-in-one solution for sales translations and localization. (Source)
The solution you use for localization is the key to efficient, affordable sales translations that connect with international audiences and close sales.
Instead of juggling different tools and management services, turn to Smartling. We offer consistent, high-quality solutions for all your translation needs. Smartling’s all-in-one sales localization workflow offers the MT technology, translation management workflows, and human services you need to create high-quality sales translations at scale.
It doesn’t matter what language you’re targeting—with Smartling, you can make sales in any language, whether it’s Turkish, Romanian, or Swedish. You can also access the fastest, highest-quality tools on the market, as well as expert services, to produce effective translations that will help you land the sale with local audiences.
Book a meeting today to learn how you can leverage Smartling’s services in your global expansion strategy.
