Branding and brand image are often given very high priority by companies, so what part does translation play in branding? Some companies give low priority to translation, and this can impact on the image of their brand. We are very careful to give a good representation of your business by providing a quality translation service.

1) Style and tone:

It is really important that we understand the purpose and target audience of a translation, for example an internal sales promotion for staff, would probably have a different style and tone than an external sales promotion for end customers. It is also important for us to know the intended target country or countries.

2) Different types of translation:

Different types of translation require a different approach. For example legal translation is all about fidelity to the original. When we provide certified translations, we are signing to say that the translation is faithful to the original text. In marketing however, translators need to be much more lateral and free thinking, its about communicating concepts and ideas rather than something literal and word for word. Many translation texts combine elements of more than one skill, for example in translating food packaging, the ingredients lists are all about accuracy and fidelity to the original text, whilst the same package could have marketing slogans, which the client wants to use to make the product attractive to potential buyers.

3) Accents, special characters and font compatibility:

All translations provided by better languages in a word format are also supplied as a pdf, this allows you to verify correct display of accents and special characters. We can check print proofs and sign off finished artwork for a translation we have provided, if you provide a low res pdf copy. This is our preferred way of working, because it is easy for errors to creep in at the print stage, for example due to cut and paste errors by designers who are not familiar with the target languages.

Some languages could have font compatibility problems, although this is less common than it used to be with the advent of unicode.

4) Agreed ways of working – matching translations to your chosen style:

Its also important to think about your corporate style guide when translating into other languages, for example if you use a none standard font, will it handle accents and special characters? Does your company style require the use of lower case in all headings, this would make sense in some languages, but not in others. When we work regularly with clients, we can address many of these issues, and develop agreed ways of working.