Tuesday, April 29, 2008

Understanding the Translation Services

SRK: Services & Foreign

For websites to work and sell in foreign markets, it needs to speak in their language. This is where Translation Services come in. Translation Service is simply defined as adapting the language of a website or a document to the language of a particular country in order to sell a product or provide service whether it’s financial or legal.

Statistics have been done to show why there is a growing need for translation services:

• Web users are four times more likely to purchase from a site that communicates in the customer's language (www.idc.com).
• Over 100 million people access the Internet in a language other than English.
• Over 50% of Web Users speak a native language other than English (www.glreach.com).
• Visitors stay for twice as long (site stickiness is doubled), if a website is in their own language (Forrester Research).

Translation in itself is not always the answer to language requirements, in particular where marketing or creative material is concerned. A company that offers translation services knows that when a copy needs to be adapted so it feels as if it has been written specifically for a market, or key phrases such as a play on words or alliteration need to be maintained, literal translation is not the answer. These companies fully understand that Translation Services is not the same as literal translation.

Other Websites use vast numbers of documents in lots of different file types. The most common types of source files that can be translated are: HTML, XHTML, XML, JAVA, FLASH, CSS, and ASP.