Translation of Product Catalogs: How to Ensure High Quality of Your Product Catalogs in a Foreign Market
Any business aspiring to sell internationally needs high-quality translation of product documentation into the target market’s language. A poorly translated product catalog may undermine the international success of your products and services.
On the other hand, a well-translated catalog represents your brand boldly and clearly and supports your company’s reputation as it shows how much you care about your customer’s convenience.
Gone are the days when a product catalog could only take a form of a more or less heavy tome. Today, product catalogs may exist in various formats, including traditional printed copies, downloadable PDF documents, interactive page flip catalogs, or simply a set of product pages on your site.
No matter the format, to effectively present your products in a foreign market you need to make sure that your catalog’s visual appeal, clarity, and coherence do not get lost in translation.
In this article, we provide some of our professional tips to help you get the most out of your product catalogs in foreign markets.
Or, if you want to simplify the translation of your product catalogs, you can contact us and we’ll be happy to help.
Aspect #1: Visual Appeal
In translation, your product descriptions may expand or shrink depending on the source and target language. As a result, the content of your catalog may start looking too thin or too dense. To make sure that your catalog effectively transfers the intended brand message, you need to keep an eye on your catalog layout during and after its translation.
TIPS
- Allow enough time to check the layout of your catalog after translation.
- Ask your language service provider up front if the layout will be affected by the translation. Usually, your translation agency will know how much the text gets expanded or shrinks during translation.
- If you have a brand book/style guide applied to all your marketing literature, share it with your language service provider, as that may influence the translator’s choices too.
- If you have an editable version of your catalog (and you usually do), ask your translation agency if they work with that file format. It may speed up the work and facilitate post-editing.
- And, in general, collaborate with your language service provider. The best results are achieved when your LSP is engaged in the layout work. Sometimes a canny rephrase may avoid complicated changes in layout.
Here at GEF, we understand the importance of the visual appeal of your marketing documents. For that reason, we enriched our offer with desktop publishing services, and we work with all file formats you can imagine. We can also help you with developing your style guides and make sure that your brand identity is carefully preserved in all the translated materials.
Aspect #2: Clarity
When launching your offer in a foreign market, the last thing you want is to make it difficult for your potential customer to understand. To make the decision to buy your product the customers need to clearly understand what your product is about and which variants and options best suit their needs.
TIPS
- Our first tip here is, of course, to take care of the terminology. The more specialized your product or service, the higher importance should be given to the knowledge and understanding of the terminology. If your language service provider does not understand your industry well enough, he may fail to transfer essential information clearly to your target audience. So, make sure that your translators are experts in your field. For example, at GEF, we have a full-fledged expertise to provide language support to Metals & Mining, Oil & Gas, Electrical Engineering and Healthcare.
- To achieve the necessary level of clarity, catalogs include a lot of graphical content. Some images may contain uneditable text that requires translation. Such text is often overlooked. An experienced translation agency will prompt you to provide editable versions of the graphics or suggest other options for translating such text. However, before sending your catalog to print, make sure that all the graphical content in your catalog is properly translated.
- The same applies to tables. They too may be embedded in your catalogs in the form of uneditable graphics. Make sure that they are included in the translation project and are handled at the same time and by the same team. That way you ensure terminological coherence and avoid translation inaccuracies that might be due to the lack of context when such tables are translated separately as an afterthought.
Aspect #3: Coherence
Another major aspect of the translation of product catalogs is coherence. It must be addressed on three levels: within the document, between different versions of the same document, and between various documents of your company. Here are our tips for each of those levels.
TIPS
- Catalogs are usually quite voluminous. At the same time, a big part of catalog content is repeatable. The same product categories, features, and options are mentioned tens and hundreds of times. And you don’t want several different translations for the same term. When deadlines are tight, it might take more than one person to translate your catalog. In this case, make sure that your translators work as a team. A good language service provider ensures that translators can communicate with each other and share a terminology base. Also, proofreading becomes critically important in this situation. So, make sure that this step is not omitted.
- The second level is coherence between versions. It goes on autopilot when you build a long-term collaboration with a translation agency that maintains your glossaries and term bases and can use previously translated versions of your documents for reference. When you translate your catalog for the first time, or if you change your language service provider, make sure to discuss the question of version control. A serious language service provider will ask you for reference material and glossaries to make sure that your terminology is properly handled from version to version.
- Finally, your product catalogs make an integral part of the overall marketing and technical literature describing your product or service. And therefore it is important to ensure coherence between catalog translations and other translated documents of your company. One tip here is to build a good collaboration with one language service provider that is capable to handle all your translation volumes. This way your LSP can also manage your terminology, maintain your company glossaries and term bases, and the translators get familiar with your offer and spend less time in research to produce a high quality translation. Also, we advise you to keep a copy of your glossaries and keep track of all your translated documents, so that you could easily find all the necessary reference material if needed.
Or just contact GEF
If all the above tips seem complicated and you want to ensure high-quality translation of your catalogs without extra stress on your resources, GEF is here to help you. Contact us and we’ll do all the heavy lifting for you, including the appearance, coherence, and content of your catalogs!
