How Translation Agency Works in General?
The first thing you have to do to start business in Japan is to have contents translated into Japanese. There are...
Understanding customer motivations is critical when selling products. Your messaging has to be intuitive to people's mind. You, as a marketer, set the target segment and create nice catchy wordings. You may think "why not using this nice copy for Japanese customers?" The most affordable way to translate is machine translation.
Is Google Translation good enough for marketing?
Machine translation has been sophisticated so rapidly these days. Google Translation is a good choice in most of the cases for it is one of the smartest. However, it is not good enough for marketing translation since it is smart enough if the source is just a word, or complete sentence. When it comes to marketing copy, do you usually make it complete proper English sentence? Probably not.
Let's try out with Google Translation
This is the a sign that I found on the street. It is common, intuitive, easy to understand, and very simple.
This is good. You have no objection, right? Let's try how it comes out from Google Translation.
Wow, it is interesting. We cannot use these for marketing in Japan. I will show you why. Let me reverse translate the result from Japanese to English.
What are the problems?
First of all, we have 2 meanings for the word "right." One is most suitable, which is what it means in this example, and another is the opposite of left. Since Google could not understand which "right" it stands for, it interprets the equipment is "on the right" hand side.
As for the second line, it turns out to be good. However, it is not a common catch for Japanese audience and it does not mean it is the lowest price in the market. When we see this expression "再低コスト" we have no idea what cost it stands for. I should rewrite it to make it more meaningful for Japanese, we should use the term "価格" which is the translation from "price" in English.
The last line is the worst. Can not win? It came out to be opposite meaning.
Any improvements if we tweak a little?
As a second thought, may be I should make 2 lines into one sentence as "Lowest cost won't be beat," and do the same thing again.
The expression itself is not good at all for marketing purpose. After all, the meaning came out to be totally opposite. Well, do you still think Google Translation can be used for marketing in Japan, such as street signs?
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