March 30, 2009
Mastering a foreign language is usually marked by an ability to utter words and sentences the way a normal speaker would. Even when you’re not a native speaker, you can learn to speak it in a way that comes close to it.
While books, lessons and language learning software offer the best platform for learning a new language, mastering its pronunciation is usually best accomplished by tuning in to those who speak it well. As such, listening to native speakers on a regular basis will be the best activity you can take part in.
If you have access to them, try to converse with native speakers regularly. While it’s fine to practice with your peers on the same level as you, you’ll just end up acquiring each other’s mistakes, most of the time. Native speakers, can easily correct any pronunciation mistakes that you make, apart from being a treasure trove to listen to.
Listening to media in the foreign language – songs, movies, audiobooks and TV shows – are a great way to learn proper pronunciation. However, they usually work best when you already understand what the context behind the material is, so that you can focus on pronunciation. As such, it is recommended that you choose those materials with which you already have context, such as foreign dubs of movies you’ve already seen or English songs translated into another language.
Does that sound hard? Well, it is. Nobody said mastering a new language is going to be easy, right?
March 28, 2009
How bad can poor translations affect your business? Back in 2005, the Wall Street Journal ran a story about a slight mistranslation, which caused a wave of panic in currency trading. Imagine all the folks who let their stocks go for cheap because of such a simple mistake.
If your business regularly depends on foreign contacts, the importance of a translation setup that you can rely on cannot be stressed enough. When you’re taking careful watch of news and events in certain countries, there’s no better place to get them than local sources. Oftentimes, they will be written in some foreign language you don’t have familiarity in and you’ll need to rely on a translation to get the complete picture.
For accurate and detailed translations for your business, nothing beats hiring in-house personnel who are capable in both the foreign vernacular and your native tongue. However, even the best translators will falter given the task of interpreting dozens upon dozens of news pieces daily.
As such, the best solutions often come as a combination of both trained language experts and a capable translation software. Good language translation applications can automatically convert news sources into English or some other language, which your human translator can then fix up to correctly reflect meaning and context. As such, your in-house employees can accomplish in a shorter time frame.
For many businesses, information is power. Arming yourself with knowledge of the right circumstances will help you make the correct business decisions.
March 27, 2009
Many online businesses, especially those in the information products market, tend to have international audiences. As such, customizing your communication so that you speak directly to their sensibilities will be crucial to the success of any marketing campaign.
When looking to get under your customers’ skin, there are two things that need to be your primary focus.
1. Speaking in their language
While you may write your main text in the English vernacular, localizing certain portions of it (such as the greetings and various important components), can equality endear your communication with your recipients. When you’re selling an ebook, for instance, it’s extremely easy to translate those chapter titles to most any dialect using a language translation software. Why not add that in to your emails to a group of customers in a specific country? At the least, it will look cheesy. At best, it might grab you an extra sale or more.
2. Speaking their culture
This one’s trickier and requires a little more research. Instead of just speaking some of their language, you’re going to try and reach out by incorporating their culture into your copy. When emailing a Spanish speaking audience about an online money-making technique, for instance, you can refer to how they can enjoy their siestas knowing full well their pockets are not suffering because of it. It’s easy enough to employ but can mean a lot when it comes to how well they receive your pitch.
March 26, 2009
Ever hired a professional translator to convert a long business document into your local tongue? If you have, you will probably be surprised to know that, save for their familiarity with the foreign language, the tools available to most professional translators are also available to you.
If you’ve ever fancied buying a translation software such as those available here, it might encourage you to know that most professional language translators usually keep the exact same applications in their arsenal. Even though they can probably translate those long written materials from scratch, modern language translation software can do the job so capably, it literally saves hours of work from their day.
Instead of rewriting the document into the other language sentence by sentence and word per word, professional translators usually just run the documents through the application to get their first draft. Of course, they’ll proofread it for possible grammar mistakes and change some of the sentence construction to make it clearer, which is essentially what your’re paying for.
Should your needs be modest, though, you can skip the professional services altogether and just do the translating yourself with a language software. With the advanced results most language applications provide, the results you can get will usually be legible and easy-to-understand. Sure, you may get some mistakes sometimes, but I doubt you’ll find much to complain about. It will save your business a lot of money and, potentially, a lot of time.
March 25, 2009
One of the problems with businesses going global are the languages people end up using in their email communication. I used to work for a French company, with employees whose native language span a pretty varied range – English, French, Spanish and Dutch.
We use English as the common communication medium although things can easily go awry every once in a while. Sometimes, we have Dutch clients who find English a bit difficult to converse in. Instead of struggling to express themselves, they directly address a couple of the Dutch-speaking people in the thread in their native tongue. Since the trend has been started, the rest of the communication usually follows in the same vernacular, leaving us non-speakers bored to tears having to look at the thread.
Since everyone’s busy throughout the day and can’t be bothered to translate it, the rest of us end up knowing absolutely nothing about the how the thread shapes up – a real problem when one of the issues they discuss can actually be fixed using the expertise of one of the non-Dutch speakers on the list. During weekly meetings, the Dutch speakers will typically clarify how the rest of the communication went, at which point can the rest of us chime in with our suggestions.
A problem like this could easily be solved, though, if we only used a language translation software at work. Can’t understand what the last guy wrote? I’ll just run it through the application and find out the details they’re trying to get across. That way, if I actually have anything useful to contribute, I can immediately join in the thread, instead of waiting for our weekly meeting to solve simple problems or settle basic questions.
Can your office use a language translating software to help communication flow in a much easier way?
March 24, 2009
When you write for a mixed audience, occasionally peppering your work with foreign phrases can lend it a character that makes it more endearing to certain segments of it. If you write a blog, for instance, and has seen a growing number of French readers, throwing in a couple of French phrases during a piece (even if you haven’t learned to speak the tongue) can really make it all the more special for those who pick up on the reference.
Common Expressions
Throwing in a common expression from the foreign language is employed by many writers. However, much of the luster in this case tends to fade away, especially if it’s such a frequently employed phrase, such as greetings or clichés.
Section Headers
I love using the technique on section headers, especially if the article is related to the foreign language. When I wrote a piece about Italian aperitifs for a food website, for instance, I wrote short two to three word section headers, ran them through a language translation software and used the Italian equivalents on the actual piece.
While English-speaking readers probably didn’t understand what the headers meant, they would have picked up on it eventually based on the context of the section. On the other hand, Italian readers loved it, almost like it paid a genuine homage to them.
Full Foreign Language Sentences
Occasionally, I’ve seen writers use full sentences in the foreign language as part of the piece. Even without explaining what they meant, the pieces flowed smoothly, while lending it a special character. As with headers, let the context fill in the blanks.
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