The first time I heard about the concept of localization was many years ago while studying Spanish at University. A friend of mine from Spain was telling me about his own experience, and a big joke among the Spanish people. It was the Ford Nova.

What a great brand, right? Nova, in English, means a powerful explosion of light and energy. It’s romantic, exciting, and enervating—everything you want in the name of a new model car. You can imagine yourself bursting forth, swooping around turns, streaking along the highway, in your new Ford Nova. The marketing was all along those lines. Bright colors, speed, energy, and excitement, and it was doing very well in the US.

But they brought the Nova to Spain and in Spain, “No va” means doesn’t run, or doesn’t go. 

In other words, Ford named their new model quite literally: “Ford doesn’t go” or “Ford doesn’t run”. 

Can you imagine what happened the first time one of them had mechanical troubles? What that phone call to the tow truck must have been like? 

“My ‘Ford doesn’t run’ isn’t running. Can you help?”

It’s a mistake marketers can even make in their own language. I remember around the same time at college another friend of mine had a Sprint POS cell phone that also never worked. The joke became, “what a POS”. That means piece of sh**, by the way.

You can imagine, if highly paid, well-qualified marketing executives at Sprint made this mistake, how much easier it is to make a mistake when translating to a foreign language. The Spanish-speaking executives at Ford never even stopped to think about what Nova might mean in their own language, because they were so busy thinking about what it means in English. It’s just the way the human mind works sometimes, we fixate on one side of things and forget to step back to think about other angles that we may have been ignoring before.

The goal of language localization is to be careful and very deliberate about how we deal with this potential for disaster. We proactively think through all possible connotations, by studying the language and the culture. You want your marketing content to be effective and impactful in the way that you intended, showing your new audience how great your product or service is, telling them how much it can make their lives better and solve problems. Even one small mistake can defeat all the energy, not to mention time and money you put into your marketing effort. This is why language localization is so important.

At Capital Typing, our language localization services are supported by highly qualified linguists who are knowledgeable not only in translation, but also in marketing and cultural considerations that go into crafting effective content. We will break down your marketing strategy, branding, and terminology used throughout your marketing material, and analyze it deeply in the original language first. Then our team of linguists will take care of translation not just of words, but of concepts, bearing in mind all the possible connotations and cultural implications of the phrasing used. 

There are dozens of examples like the two I mentioned above. Big, successful organizations that completely fumbled their entry into new markets because they didn’t take the time to do proper language localization analysis. Let Capital Typing ensure that your language localization is done right and your transition into new foreign language markets is a success.

5 Keys to Accessing Global Markets through Integrated Language Translation

Capital Typing specialized in turnkey BPO solutions, which combine comprehensive BPO service offerings into custom solutions designed to meet our clients needs, wherever they may be, whatever their goals may be. When it comes to language translation, our goal is to help clients fast-track the pace at which they introduce their organization to new international markets and foreign-language speaking populations. 

Our language translation services, integrated in a complete BPO service offering, drive engagement and business gains by realizing your organization’s mission in new settings, while maintaining management oversight and control throughout the transition. 

This article reviews 5 key areas where our language translation solutions can help:

      1. Marketing support.

We specialize in high quality translations, which will help introduce your organization’s brand and marketing message to new markets effectively and impactfully. Our localization service ensures that marketing material is translated in a way that respects cultural differences between your original market and the new market you are entering. Your message will be presented in a way that captures the full meaning of the original, and presents it in easily recognizable, effective language, that will move your new audience.

      2. Administrative and customer support functions.

Entering new markets brings new legal and compliance requirements that your organization has never encountered before. Your back office operations were set up according to the requirements of your home country and its standards. But now you need to restructure operations in a way that covers both the requirements of your home country and the meets compliance and legal requirements in the new marketplace you are entering. 

This kind of transition requires depth of knowledge of business processes, and is the reason why other translation agencies will not be nearly as equipped and ready to do this job as we are at Capital Typing. Capital Typing specializes in design, management, and implementation of business processes. We look at the big picture, not just the translation of documents, but we will help you understand how to restructure your organization’s business processes to meet every need associated with the transition. 

Customer support functions will be provided in the new language, with fast set-up times, making use of your existing models and improving on them. We will create a fully integrated customer relationship management system—service without borders. Admin and compliance will likewise become a fully integrated, multi-language system, which covers requirements of multiple jurisdictions without confusion, neatly and smoothly.

        3. Bookkeeping.

Our approach to bookkeeping is methodical and well-organized. This allows us to easily introduce multi-language support and processing into the process, without losing efficiency or clarity of reporting. Local offices and operations will be able to plug into the bookkeeping function, providing required data, and accessing reports they need, and doing so in their own language, without having to pause each time to request translations. The language translation function will be fully integrated in advance, so that bookkeeping is always available in your language, whatever that may be.

       4. Data entry, clerical services, and more.

Every business process produces back-end office work such as data entry, typing, scanning, and office management. The basic infrastructural requirements for these services are the same in any language, so our approach is to integrate language translation into a universal, multi-language support system. When Capital Typing is handling a back-end process for you, it means that process will be easily convertible to any language, on demand.

When your organization extends its operations to new markets where different languages are spoken, Capital Typing will manage the transition simply and efficiently, so that the proven business processes that you have already established and in which your teams are trained, will be maintained and extended naturally to the new offices and operations in the foreign market.

At Capital Typing, we have built a systematic approach to smarter Business Process Outsourcing based on modular service offerings. This modular approach allows us to scale operations up and down on demand, and enables fast, flexible customization of our BPO solutions to any organization’s operational requirements. This is what makes our language translation to access global markets so effective as a business tool, to expand your operations. At each stage of our modular systems, language translation is integrated from the beginning, so that the same flexibility and customization we provide is easily extended to any language, without loss of momentum.