If your business is heavily web-based, you already know the potential of the Internet to reach and reach an international audience quickly through online advertising. To serve your international customers, you will likely have your website translated into the major languages spoken in the markets you are targeting. For many people, this part is relatively straightforward: send your copy to the translator, who will provide you with a quote based on the volume of text and any other special requirements you may have, such as checking the translated text of web forms once you are in. line. But have you considered how you are going to handle the translation of your online advertising material?
Done correctly, the translation of advertising material online differs from ordinary translation in some important ways. First of all, an important part of the material that will be translated will actually be the keywords you bid or buy on rather than the ad copy itself. Translating keywords effectively is different from translating paragraphs of text for reasons that we will discuss below. A good ad translator should also function differently from a colleague who works with ordinary text when it comes to the ad copy itself.
The last point may seem like the most obvious, but it is worth expanding on. The advertising scheme you are using will generally have restrictions placed on them, such as the maximum length of the headlines and other lines of the ad. Your ad copy was likely chosen to sound catchy rather than because a particular literal meaning was important. Therefore, to translate an ad online, it may be more effective to use a fuzzy translation that sounds catchy and adheres to length restrictions. As an example of the type of decisions that the translator can make, there is a word in Spanish that can be used to translate “summer holidays” (“veraneo”) that is actually shorter than the general word for “holidays” (“vacations “). If the translator knows that your business or campaign deals specifically with the summer holidays (and a good translator will always take the time to understand your business), they can use the shorter word, which can be crucial when translating the title of a ad with a 25- character limit.
Advertising keyword translation issues may be less obvious. But think first about the process you went through to choose your keywords. You probably start by choosing a few phrases that characterize your business. Then you may have expanded this list by considering synonyms, possibly using a tool like Google Trends to find the most likely synonyms a user would search for. I would also have considered which combinations of these synonyms were most likely in English. For example, in British English, the words “rent”, “rent” and “let” have similar meanings, but “rent” is often associated with industrial vehicles or machines, “rent” with residential property and “rent” with property. commercial. . Subconsciously, your choice of possible keywords was likely influenced by the grammar of English and the grammar of web searches. For example, you would probably choose “van rental” over “van rental” or “van rental”, neither of which is usually grammatical in English. If you were running a vacation company, you might choose “minibreaks Paris” instead of “minibreaks in Paris”, because you know that people tend to leave out short function words like “in” in web searches.
When it comes to translating these keywords, you might naively think that you can look up translations of each individual word and do a search and replace in the keyword list. Unfortunately, this will generally not be effective for a number of reasons. Where there are synonyms like “rent”, “rent”, “leave” in English, the foreign language will probably not have exactly the same number of synonyms with a direct mapping between them. (In Spanish, for example, the two verbs “rent” and “rent” can be applied to both vehicles and properties). Therefore, in the foreign language, you may have to consider combinations of words that you did not consider in English, and some combinations may not be feasible.
Some of the grammar restrictions that affected your English keyword selection may not apply in the foreign language. For example, in English, the phrase “vans Hire” is usually not grammatical. But in French, Italian, and Spanish (and indeed many other languages), the phrase would be common and grammatical with singular or plural, leading to more keyword combinations to consider bidding. And in these and other Latin-based languages, compounds are usually formed by inserting the word for “de” between the content words (eg, “de” in Spanish and French, “di” in Italian). But in web searches, this word can optionally be omitted, so that in Spanish, for example, a Spanish searching for “car rental” can search (among other things) for “car rental” or simply “car rental”.
Most subtle of all, the grammar of web searches actually differs from language to language. Some of my own research suggests, for example, that Spanish speakers are more likely to include the word “de” among content words than French speakers, and that Spanish speakers are more likely to pluralize words in their searches.
Lastly, remember that some online advertising systems offer a keyword tool that will suggest alternatives for you to bid on a starter list. You should also speak with your translator to see if he or she can help you choose from the list of suggestions and advise you on their meanings when necessary.
