YOUR OWN LOCAL IN-COUNTRY EMPLOYEES OR AFFILIATES CAN DO IT ALL
Local in-country employees or affiliates provide all kinds of supportive services to help bring your products to market. From money to manpower to contracts, to after-sales services and even product information, their job is to make your life easier. It makes sense, then, you might also ask them to provide translations of your marketing collateral, packaging labels, websites and other written materials. So why not?
USING LOCAL EMPLOYEES OR SUBSIDIARIES FOR TRANSLATIONS CAN COME WITH HIGH RISK AND COSTS
Entering global markets is exciting, but it also brings challenges in the form of new cultures, languages, and legal systems that can make business entry into a new country problematic. What seems straightforward in the US — such as creating marketing collateral, contract agreements, packaging, and websites — can become complicated and error-prone in the hands of a team of local international employees. Here’s what you should know about employee translations.
BEFORE OFF-LOADING LOCALIZATION TO AN INTERNATIONAL EMPLOYEE OR AFFILIATE, CONSIDER THE FOLLOWING:
Media Quality. Do your local employees or affiliates everywhere have your standard of quality when it comes to creating high value media for your new market? What, in fact, are the linguistic qualifications of your local resources?
Cultural Awareness. Do those qualifications include in-depth knowledge of linguistics and marketing etiquette in your target market? Do your employees or affiliates know to avoid images and concepts that would be offensive to consumers in those markets? Do they realize that the most well-written legal document could be contentious because other countries answer to different legal entities or jurisdictional authorities than the US does? And craft their legal texts in a very different style?
Subsidiary or Local Office Alliance. Will your relationship with local offices be hindered by asking them to take on the added burden of marketing localization? Will added responsibilities distract from the job they were actually hired to do?
Accuracy and Consistency. Are your local employees or subsidiaries accustomed to translating materials for US-based clients? Do they use translation memory, glossaries and style guides in their localized documents to ensure consistency, speed, and an evolving data base of your company’s terminology, branding and style?
Employee/Subsidiary Bandwidth. Do your international employees have time to perform detailed updates, website customization, and translation volumes during peak sales periods or product releases? Will there be a consistent and designated translation team month-on-month and year in and out, or will you get whoever happens to have a little extra time during a particular week or month?
Control. Who will have control over translation quality, scheduling and release dates? More importantly, who will have ultimate ownership of your translated materials? Depending on local laws, translations performed by subsidiaries may not be considered “work made for hire,” which means you may not hold the rights to that work.
Customer Rapport. Would poorly translated documents affect your relationship with customers?
Legal Susceptibility. Do your local in-country employees or affiliates share your concerns about translation mistakes potentially leading to legal action, financial loss, and damage to your brand?
Risk and Cost. Without language automation technology, your local employees or affiliates will incur significantly longer turnaround times for translation and less continuity which will have an adverse effect on customers and the bottom line.
WANT TO LEARN MORE?
Digital Language Services will help you make a quick entry into global markets while localizing your intellectual property and avoiding costly legal expenses. We work with talented designers, cultural consultants, linguists, and technologists to ensure that your localized translations are linguistically accurate and resonate with targeted audiences in local markets around the world.
Get in Touch Now
info@digilang.com
1-917-970-0201