We are very busy with food labelling translation projects at the moment for several clients. Food labelling of course requires accurate description for legal reasons, but as with other areas of packaging translation, one of the major issues is available space. We are talking to a new client at the moment about the possibility of translating from English into 6 languages on their box artwork, there is always a trade off here between compliance, readability, and attractive packaging. Your product may be legally compliant if it has 12 languages on it, but will customers be drawn to the packaging? From a translation agency perspective, in one sense the more copy, the more work for us, but on the other hand, if clients enjoy commercial success internationally, they are more likely to need our services. Our take would always be to have the fewest number of languages practical on packaging, as you can then provide the most visually appealing marketing message. Of course if you are the size of Coca Cola, you may have the distribution network and volume of sales to justify individual country packaging, but even large multi-nationals don’t always have this luxury.

We have several interesting projects on the go at the moment, including one into 23 languages including Kazakh, not a language we do in large volume. Our food label translation page includes information that potential clients should find useful if thinking of commissioning food label translation projects.

This entry was posted on Monday, December 14th, 2009 at 1:06 pm and is filed under News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.