How do I avoid Brand Shaming?

A user only takes a twentieth of a second to form their first impression of the website or profile they are visiting. This has implications for all the factors that you may find on any landing page, e-commerce or profile, including the images, text, the organisation and design of buttons or options for the user.

Why does this occur? The human brain is programmed to form rapid conclusions with very little information. Because of this, we can confirm that in such as small amount of time, a user is not capable of examining each and every element that they encounter. So what takes place is the halo effect. This means that all the factors of the digital environment are directly harmed or benefitted by each of their individual effects. 

In our article entitled Some of the most famous translation «slip-ups», we talk about the translation errors that led some big brands to more than one misunderstanding. In this article, we will talk about how to make a good first impression in this twentieth of a second.

You may have thought about using a machine translator to translate your website or e-commerce.  And why not, you may be thinking. If the text is made up of simple sentences or commands and very standard buttons, there won’t be a problem. What problem could arise from using an NMT (neural machine translation) translation system without any kind of personalisation or detail? 

This system uses a Recurrent Neural Network (RNN) that feeds all text that it adds back into itself. This neural network operates by coding each segment of the text so that a second network predicts and reorders the words in the target language. 

With this method you can find equivalences from any source language to any target language, or that is what it seems, right? Not so. Here’s an example:  if your initial website language has few statistical equivalences in relation to the language you want to translate into, the automatic translation system will choose a bridge language, that is, a language it possesses with the highest number of equivalences. This means that the automatic translation software will not make a translation from the source language to a target language, but instead it will do something like this: 

Source language>bridge language>target language

This technique is used by machine translation software to offer a greater range and it considerably increases the margin of error both in terminology and in the cohesion of the translated text.

Communication with the user is essential, not only for the user experience, but also as a branding strategy. With well- written and translated website content the user, and potential customer, is able to see the respect and dedication with which you treat your brand and their presence.  If, within the text information on your website, networks or e-commerce, you support the communication between your brand and the client, you can’t let a spelling mistake, a lack of meaning in the text, or a mistake in the translation define the image that the client forms of you. 

A mistake in the description of a product can give you negative comments from unsatisfied customers.  An incorrect translation of something published on social networks may make your brand less credible.

It doesn’t seem such a good idea now, does it?

Don’t become the brand that doesn’t value its content, or the one that users don’t trust because of its lack of attention to the quality of its texts; at BigTranslation we offer the security and peace of mind you need so that the content of your texts and translations is of excellent quality.