People go into entrepreneurship when they feel that their creativity does not fit into a corporate environment or simply want a life away from nine to five. Entrepreneurs are important to market economies because they create new products and services and therefore serve as important factors in a country’s growth and development. Passion, willingness to improvise and listen to others, as well as the determination to succeed, make a successful entrepreneur. Once all is going well, a business owner will want to extend his services globally and he or she must be ready to surmount the main brick wall which is the language barrier. There will always be a need for some quick translation of documents or speech when collaborating with clients or employees overseas. Here are some quick translation tips for a successful entrepreneur.

Employ a professional translator

A successful entrepreneur is someone that will be more involved in the affairs of his business. This would mean more involvement in meetings and sometimes, interviews of some top-class prospective employees. There are some companies that make it compulsory for their prospective employees to meet with the CEO before onboarding. If you are running a global company, you definitely will need to hire a professional translator or translators. They will help you with successful communication with your employees and clients who have first languages different from yours. They can also help with translation on your website. This will help you stick to business as usual and not start skipping important meetings just because of the differences in languages spoken. Getting a translation services company is important for entrepreneurs because it will help fuel up their marketing strategies. They will be able to reach out to a more diverse audience if they can speak to them in their own language.

Make room for expansion on word documents

When doing translation of documents either online or physically, you need to create some extra space to accommodate any extra words due to the translation. Some translations of documents typically require more words than those on the original document to pass the same message across. This is called the expansion factor and it means that a document of 300 words could become 500 words after the translation is completed. If you are building a website and pasting your mission statement in one section of the front page, you need to make more space available for that section if you hope to include a translation option. For example, word counts usually increase by about 25% when translating from English to Russian but English to some Asian languages requires less space.

Be careful with embracing low rate offers

Some translation services offer extremely low rates such as a cent per word or 2 cents for every word translated. While this may seem like some savings for you, you need to be sure that their services do not skip essential steps in the translation process. It could turn out to be a penny-wise, pound-foolish transaction as such poor service could cost you a great deal of money and even time to fix mistakes later on. It is even possible that some errors are not discovered at all and this could be very harmful to your brand and the services you render. Make sure to always ask questions about the translator’s services and if there is some form of guarantee for the translation work before doing business.

Stay away from translation software

So many people make use of machine translations these days for informal translations or short write-ups that are not made of figures of speech. It could work for a few words but when you have a lot to translate, you need a human translator. Machine-generated translations can only give a draft of what you want to translate. When you offer a less than perfect translation, you are indirectly saying that your intended audience is not important to you and that they don’t need to understand the message you are passing across. This is what a PR agency would advise you as well because when you offer inaccurate translation you risk losing a dedicated audience by not communicating properly in their language.

Plan your translation ahead

This is a very common mistake that companies make. They start off by translating one document and then realize at the eleventh hour that they would require further translations. If you plan your translation needs in advance, it will help you avoid any last-minute rush did I forget to mention that it would cost you some money. So, as a successful entrepreneur make sure that you pick out the documents that require translation some days before you need to use them. After translating them, go through it with someone who is a professional and tie all the loose ends.

Final word

The need for translation has become more important and its awareness keeps growing everywhere. If you had been thinking of setting up branches of your company overseas and were bothered about the communication barrier, you can now confidently take on your expansion dream. These tips will guide you not to make any mistakes. A mistake in translation could not only stop you from doing business in that location, but it could also get you into trouble.

About the Author:Ken is an experienced SEO professional. He assists businesses in improving their search engine results by optimizing copy and landing pages, as well as conducting continual keyword research. He is also very skilled in researching and implementing content recommendations for organicSEOsuccess.