A company should not only deal with translations because it may lead to less fruitful consequences and the points mentioned below try to make it more clear :
1. Loss in assumption of profit
When the top class companies decide to enter into sales at an international level then they tend to follow some localization steps in order to enhance their marketing. They have an assumption that their marketing products need to go through localization (translated into the local language according to the place) but this has proved to be a completely wrong notion.
Under this assumption they tend to neutralize their efforts by doing so. Due to this action it has come up that many deals have been lost and the products were also at a loss.
2. Translation
Some of the companies take further steps to focus more on localization like for this they keep a well trained staff. They have speakers native to that particular local place. They tend to translate all the details of their product in local language. In fact nothing is left untouched by localization. In the end they are only applying a language mask to the materials which is also important but not to that extent that it should be considered as the fundamental step for global marketing.
3. Other fundamental steps
It has been observed that translation and localization do not succeed every time. There are other primary steps that are to be followed by the companies. They need to focus more on profiles of projects and products and their value so that they can be better understood by right people.
4. Focus on other fields
Let’s understand this point better with an instance:
Suppose a company specialises in automation and decides to move from its industry from China to Indonesia then consequently according to them they will try their best to focus on Indonesian.
They will try to translate and localise everything in Indonesian and keep a translator for that. The translators help them to convert the eBooks and datasheets of the company’s products into the local language.
In short the efforts of the company are all localized. But all these efforts go in vain when they find out that the MD and manager focus more on quality, labour cost reduction, continuous production rates, manufacturing space requirements and avoidance of child labour abuses. So in the end translations and localization bear fruitless results. Therefore its better we focus on other fields instead of translations.
All the above highlighted points very well pretence that translations have always been unproductive and so we need adopt other steps accordingly like
- Focus on corporate strategy and not on marketing preferences such as strength of sales channel and currency risk.
- Build a perfect program by planning and executing well and focus on continuously improved and optimized content.
- Localized b2b market content strategy with the building on fundamental blocks which does not focus on only translations.
- Build and optimize the content in terms of market conditions and personas
- Focus on infrastructure
- Don’t translate but transcreate the content i.e. do no only translate the words instead convert it into something which serves the purpose of localisation as well as does not harm the company sales.
Michael Pierz is an experienced industrial marketing expert who advises that there should be improvement and customization on B2B market.