7 Key Moves to Boost Language Quality Management for Marketing Campaigns
In any language, successful marketing aims at connecting with its audience. Success depends on staying true to your brand voice—and speaking to people in authentic, culturally relevant terms.
As a result, marketing localization requires its own kind of creativity. It may be less about translating word for word, and more about capturing the right spirit and tone.
At the same time, the stakes can be high for your business. Faulty translations can undermine your international marketing campaigns, waste resources, and alienate the audiences you want to reach.
What does that mean for language quality management? Here are 5 ways to get the review and QA process right—so your marketing translations hit the mark and get the job done.
- Emphasize strategic content creation and local knowledge.
At the front end of the process, the right approach to content creation can make localization and quality management easier.
If possible, consider creating original content in a neutral style that assumes little to no local knowledge. Your translators can add the right cultural and linguistic touches. You might even hire local copywriters to create content directly in the target language, skipping translation altogether.
At the same time, marketing material demands expert quality review and assessment, just like any other localized content.
Your quality reviewers and subject-matter specialists should be native speakers with an insider’s view of the target region and culture. Provide them with detailed audience research and background information—so they know all the context when vetting your translators’ and content creators’ work.
- Make cultural relevance your priority.
Marketers don’t just use straightforward, factual language. They often rely on storytelling, wordplay, humor, local idioms, and insider references to deliver their message in an engaging, memorable way.
What happens if your translations strip away these linguistic and cultural nuances, or get them wrong? You may fail to connect with your audience or even damage your brand by offending local sensibilities.
Yes, technical accuracy is vital—but it’s just as important to make sure your localized content hits the right chord with your audience.
That’s why cultural relevance should be at the forefront of every decision you make, from building your language quality team to refining your process and the metrics you use to evaluate quality.
- Bring your marketing team into the loop.
As a rule, language quality management is more effective when translators and quality reviewers are on the same page, with open communication and a free flow of information between teams.
For marketing translations, consider expanding the circle. That means integrating your marketing team and content creators into the process.
Your marketing team can offer suggestions to align translations and quality standards with your brand voice and goals. Conversely, feedback from translators and quality reviewers can help content creators tailor their material to the audience and make it easier to translate.
- When in doubt, lean on linguistic expertise.
When teams collaborate, they’re bound to disagree at times. To resolve such conflicts, put the emphasis on linguistic and cultural accuracy.
Marketers and other stakeholders may have strong opinions about what works for their brand. Translators and language quality experts may have equally firm views about what’s linguistically and culturally accurate.
What happens when these perspectives clash? Give the edge to your linguists, especially your language quality team.
While marketers excel in their domain, their knowledge doesn’t always translate across cultures. Encourage open dialogue, but when it comes to decisions about language quality, trust the experts to ensure your content hits the target.
- Empower an in-country expert to resolve conflicts.
On the linguistic side, you need a process to arbitrate when translators and language quality reviewers disagree with each other. For this process to work, a single authority should have the final word on all linguistic questions.
For marketing, it’s especially important for this person to have up-to-date knowledge of the local culture. Even a native speaker can miss key cultural details if they’ve been based abroad for years.
Whenever possible, the arbitrator should thus be an expert who lives in the target country or region.
An in-country native speaker is more likely to be in touch with what’s happening on the ground: the latest news, popular culture, slang, and more. That gives them insights that can ensure the level of authenticity necessary for successful marketing.
- Provide flexible guidance for quality reviews.
When reviewing marketing translations, language quality reviewers need accurate reference tools to ensure the right brand voice and terminology.
Even so, strictly following the in-house style guide isn’t always the best approach.
For instance, a U.S. company might succeed in its home market with a casual, conversational voice. But in a market like Japan, a more formal style might resonate better with the audience.
Language quality reviewers need the flexibility to make judgment calls in these situations, balancing your brand’s needs with their own insights into the local language and culture. Their feedback can also help you refine your style guidelines for the target market so translators can produce more effective work.
- Calibrate metrics to marketing goals.
Marketing is often playing a complex linguistic and cultural game, with multiple factors influencing successful localization. As a result, quality reviewers may need to go beyond standard metrics to provide translators with more nuanced feedback and insights than usual.
In the industry-standard MQM-DQF frameworks, three basic quality dimensions apply to almost any kind of translation: accuracy, fluency, and terminology. But for translations of marketing materials, a strong quality assessment might include other dimensions beyond these fundamentals.
For example:
- Style: How well does the translation capture nuances of language, such as brand style and voice?
- Verity: How appropriate is the content for the local culture or audience?
- Design: How consistent and accurate is the physical presentation of information—for instance, the layout and font on a product website?
By fine-tuning your metrics, you can align quality assessments with your specific marketing goals and content types. Not sure what mix is right for your needs? Consult your language quality management provider for guidance.
Winning at Marketing Localization
Localization for marketing is tricky business.
Translators need to home in on nuances that may be less critical for other kinds of content. They may have to tap their own creativity to produce work that captures the right voice and tone, instead of sticking too closely to the original.
For all these reasons, language quality management becomes even more essential when you take your brand abroad. By tailoring your approach to the unique challenges of marketing localization, you can minimize your risks and maximize your sway with the audiences you want to reach.