With globalization becoming a new normal for most businesses, mainly because of the influx of the internet, localization is going to play a significant role in everyone’s success story. We can say that cheap translation services can break or make a company in the modern era. Even small companies are crossing the border of their counties and providing services and products to people located abroad.
If you want people from other countries to understand what you are trying to say or convey, using your own language or using a generic approach of English will never work as not everybody across the globe is well-versed in English and people find more comfort in their native language than any other.
But if your localization goes wrong, it can have a disastrous impact on your company and might take years to replenish the reputation thus spoiled. Many companies have made the mistake of opting for poor localization services, and almost all of them have paid the price in the form of failure. In this blog post, we will look at how poor localization or poor translation can ruin your business and why you should stay away from it.
Poor user experience
You should know that it just takes 50 milliseconds for anyone on the digital platform to analyze your official website. Well, in the world of branding, the approach of judging a book by its cover always works. Whenever a person visits your website, they will analyze your digital presence based on its layout, theme, color pattern, and the availability of the website in the native language.
If you do not opt for certified translation services, you will be providing a bad user experience to your audience, not only in the case of your website but also in your offline marketing strategy.
Whenever you read an ad or visit a website, you decide whether to stay on it within a couple of seconds. Spelling mistakes or translation errors will surely keep people away from your ad or website, and thus you will be offering a poor user experience.
Cultural mistakes
There are many different words out there that have different meanings in different cultures, and if you have a good translator by your side, working for your company, then you will never have to deal with these types of cultural issues. You will be surprised to know that the same word in one language can mean respect, while in the other language or culture, it can be abuse. If you, as a company, will make such a rookie mistake, you will never be able to grab the local people’s attention.
A native speaker appointed by certified translation services will always be aware of the cultural barriers, and that’s why they will be able to keep your company away from such types of cultural mistakes, and you will always be able to preserve the pristine intent and meaning of your content.
Potential fines
If you think that the wrong translation will only expose your company to cultural mistakes and poor user-experience, then you are highly mistaken. Indeed, it will always be difficult to get everything translated into your language correctly, but this doesn’t mean that you should not hire certified translation services. This is because, in some cases, you can also be fined for poor translation services. One of the examples of such an incident can be found in the case of a shipping company that had to pay $ 5 million in the form of overtime for workers just because they missed an Oxford comma in state law.
If you have language barriers, then the situation will become worse, and you might have to deal with multiple issues at the same time. There was a hospital in Florida that made the rookie mistake of writing intoxicado rather than intoxicated, and this minor error led to a delay in the treatment of patients.
Costly accounting errors
There are many people out there who think that only words will damage their reputation if they opt for poor translation services, but you should know that even regional differences in the numeric format will have an adverse effect on your business. For example, there are many countries out there where a comma in the numeric format represents a thousand separations easier to understand and read. Then, there are those countries where the comma in the numeric format means decimal point. Such types of common mistakes in the numeric format can result in gigantic accounting errors for your company.
Along with this, you can also get the dates wrong if you will not opt for certified translation services. For example, if you will use 4/11/20, then it will mean November 2020 in the UK, but the same format would mean April 11th, 2020, in Brazil. So official translation services are essential not only for words but also for numeric format.
Hampers brand image
In addition to all the losses mentioned above, you will also have to deal with a diminishing brand reputation because of inadequate translation. Your brand can become a piece of mockery in the market if your articles or ads are spotted with any type of grammatical error. Even giant companies had the reputation of their brand tarnished just because of poor translation services. Some of the biggest names that have suffered because of inadequate translation are Coca Cola and KFC.
It doesn’t matter whether you are opting for legal translation services or any other type of translation service, you will always need to choose for high quality and reputed translation services to provide companies so that you can stay away from the rookie mistakes of localization and legal translation service.
