By the Power of Twitter

Gone are the days when everything had to be in English. The powerful micro-blogging site, Twitter announced on Wednesday that it had added right-to-left languages namely, Arabic, Farsi, Hebrew and Urdu to its Translation Center. These languages will be available on Twitter.com in Spring this year. With volunteers exceeding 400,000 around the world, Twitter’s translation center aids in making Twitter comprehensible to the masses.

With the addition of these 4 languages, the total number of available languages on Twitter equals 22.  Other foreign languages added by Twitter are Japanese, Spanish, French, Russian, Turkish, Dutch, Indonesian, Chinese, Hindi, Filipino and Malay amongst others.

New Year: New Opportunities - Website Translations

A recent survey revealed that only 18 percent of non-English speaking European customers are willing to avail services or buy products from a website which is not written in their mother tongue while 82 percent of the consumers do not want to visit a website containing information in English. This result signifies the importance of website translation in increasing your revenues and sales.

European countries are potential markets where there is demand for numerous products. The number of consumers is huge and their requirement of products is versatile. If you can reach the customers of this market, you can double the size of your current business. But there is still one barrier left that you need to deal with. It’s the difference of language which should be considered and resolved first to enter the European market. At present, the easiest way to reach the end-users is developing a website containing information about who you are and what your products are. The work is not finished here; you need to translate your website in different languages depending on your targeted area. With the help of a professional translation agency you can easily accomplish this task.

Cross-cultural Marketing Blunders

If you’re thinking of expanding your business and tapping into International markets, it is important that you hire the services of a translation agency. There have been numerous instances of renowned brands investing huge sums of money globally, without realizing that the message being conveyed could be interpreted incorrectly or may be perceived wrongly in another country. Let’s take a look at the top 5 biggest cross-cultural marketing blunders by world famous brands:

Pepsi: The literal translation of Pepsi’s slogan “Come Alive with the Pepsi Generation” got interpreted as “Pepsi will bring your ancestors from the dead” in Taiwan.

Chevrolet: When the Chevy Nova car was launched in Latin America, Chevrolet experienced a massive drop in sales in that market. The word “no va” means “it doesn’t go” in Spanish, when clearly Chevrolet wanted Chevy Nova to “go” always.