As English speakers we are really spoilt, as pretty much the whole world is trying to learn English, and where large parts of the world have not yet fully succeeded in the endeavour, they are well on the way. So this takes the pressure off as native English speakers, which might be seen as a good thing.
Read more “The easiest and most difficult languages to translate”
The translation business is growing daily due to the importance of having an internet presence, and the need to communicate your message to as wide an audience as possible to remain competitive. There are many different types of translation agencies and companies around, ranging from lone “friends of friends” who can help out at a pinch, to large, international companies with professional translators available at the click of a mouse.
SEO is the acronym for “Search Engine Optimisation”. It is an internet marketing strategy which uses search engines and affects the process through which it increases a web page’s visibility on the results of the search engine. Meaning that a website or a web page will appear higher on the search results of a search engine (like Google or Yahoo).
We can understand what translation is, and everybody knows what is meant by marketing. But what about content marketing? What is the difference between this and plain marketing? According to the Content Marketing Institute “Content marketing is a marketing technique of creating and distributing valuable, relevant and consistent content to attract and acquire a clearly defined audience – with the objective of driving profitable customer action.”
Look up “translation fails” on the internet, and you’ll immediately see why this is always good for a laugh. There are so many hilarious, unintentional bloopers out there that it’s a bit difficult to digest them all, and you certainly wouldn’t want to eat in a restaurant that serves these mistakes!
Read more “How a poor translation can mean bad business for restaurant owners”
The answer to this question is more complicated than you might think. The need for translations come up all the time in business, especially those operating internationally, but the reasons to need a translation can be quite varied. Read more “When do I need a translation?”
We see this claim repeated over and over again in pop-ups that appear in our browser or in YouTube, usually originating from language learning platforms or blogs. But is it true? The short answer: no. The slightly longer answer: sort of. Perhaps an explanation is required.
As English speakers we are really spoilt, as pretty much the whole world is trying to learn English, and where large parts of the world have not yet fully succeeded in the endeavour, they are well on the way. So this takes the pressure off as native English speakers, which might be seen as a good thing. Unfortunately however, the all-too-common result on our part is the tendency toward extreme laziness when it comes to language learning! After all, why bother when the rest of the whole is beating a path to our door and doing all the work to make themselves understood.
Read more “Which languages do you think are the most challenging?”
These days a corporate blog is a widely-used means of generating quality content of interest to our target audience. Blogs contain keywords of popular Google searches and can be about pretty much any topic under the sun. The trick is that they be an interesting read in their own right, thereby attracting the type of potential customers that we want (in the case of a business), but also that they appear high in search-engine rankings by virtue of the use of keywords.
Humour is a notorious area of difficulty in translations, as any translator will tell you. So much of humour is derived from double meanings and wordplay, small and subtle cultural references and so forth, which can often mean that it is (or can appear to be) simply untranslatable. This is not hard to understand since a great deal of humour has to do with the language itself, the way one word sounds like another or calls to mind certain associations, which belong strictly within the universe of that language and the culture related to it.
