About Advocating Global
A blog designed to support globally minded communication professionals with insight into the global communication strategies that lead to desired behavior and positive end-user outcomes. We write and invite experts to write in about global communication topics in healthcare, corporate communications and marketing, as well as best practices in localization and process management.
Our topics may vary, but our focus is always on the advocacy for the communications professional; to empower them with the tools and best practices to be a global leader and make a difference in the outcomes of the end-user.
Marketing Translation and Global Branding
Our Global Marketing Translation and Global Branding Blog is for marketing professionals, designers and writers who are involved in translation of brand messaging, websites, brochures, flyers, etc. We also address product naming and creative writing (copywriting) best practices. Foreign Markets are often one of the key growth strategies of businesses selling products and services. Brand Managers and Marketing Managers need to control consistency and accuracy in their messaging in other languages. This challenge often requires a new set of skills, a global mindset, and marketing professionals that embrace this challenge will ultimately be more successful in their jobs as they advocate for their foreign language end users.
Identification of foreign languages in translation
When you work with languages all the time, it gets easier to identify languages instantly and notice mistakes without even knowing the meaning. For instance, you don’t need to know anything about the Chinese written language to quickly see whether or not your content...
Decision to translate hashtags
The decision to translate hashtags and manage and cultivate a social media campaign around that requires planning. Think of the English campaign creation and the work that goes into the brand creation and the hashtags that reinforce that message. When that copy goes...
Translation for narration
Now is the season for Open Enrollment at many companies and presentations are being given on employee benefits and the audio recording of those presentations requires translation for narration. In our specialization of translation of healthcare human resource...
5 Tips for Bilingual Layout
Creating a bilingual design should never be the sole responsibility of your Language Service Provider. Creating a bilingual layout requires making a lot of design decisions that need to be worked through in the creative process. Here are 5 tips.
What happens after a Translation Quote loss?
Every business deals with proposals that end up in a loss and with us, that proposal may be a translation quote. A loss that happens is an opportunity for us to learn about how we do business. An important first step of any quoting process is trying to figure out...
Video Translation in a foreign language
What do you do when you get a few hours of foreign language footage that you need to cut into a few minute video, and your editor does not speak the language? We periodically get this request from agencies asking for video translation and it’s never an easy sell. This post suggests a more strategic approach to ensure that your budget meets both need and ROI.
Translating Conditional Statements in Mail Merge Fields
Translating Conditional Statements in Word is a challenge because our industry does not seem to have quite figured out how to process these. Sometimes you have to resort to the old fashioned of working, realizing it will pay off in the long run.
Font License Issues with Multilingual Typesetting
Use of Fonts in Multilingual Typesetting has never been a big problem before. But as design firms are burdened to upkeep their font license policies and the growing influence of cloud based services has increased the pressure on vendors to get their own fonts to be able to work with their client’s designs. This is a cost to the industry that somehow needs to be recouped. What would be some other ideas that could help deal with font license issues?
Our Translator Community
Whenever we are asked about who is doing our translations, the common expectation is that either we do the work "in-house" or we just "send it out" to "a translator." However, the translator community, at least within Language Solutions, mainly consists of a regular...
Testing English Product Names in China is Futile!
Linguistic Screening (or Product Name Testing) of your English Product Name should not be the process by which you’ll want to evaluate your Product Names in China. Rather, Chinese names benefit more from a phono-semantic matching process by which the sounds and/or meaning of the name are matched to fit the English name and brand.