Translation and social media
Social media is a communication system that enables people to connect to each other on online platforms. One of the first social medial platforms was MySpace which was then followed by Facebook, LinkedIn which is more of a professional networking platform, then Twitter and many others. Social media has revolutionised the relationship between people and brands. While TV adverts were aimed at trying to catch the attention of customers, social media allows individual persons to choose their interests and skip or scroll on any adverts they are not interested in. It also enables individuals to upload and share any content they want. Advertising companies and brands have jumped on this bandwagon and they focus on understanding what the users want and choose to watch or read.
Translation has played a critical role in the translation of content into hundreds of different languages for multinational companies and even smaller brands, since having properly translated and easily available content is a prerequisite for rapid growth and global expansion. A simple Google search shows that, for example, the number of Facebook users in Italy skyrocketed following the launch of the Italian language interface, jumping from 375,000 to 933,000 in just four months, while in France, during the three months following the release, the number jumped from 1.4 to 2.4 million.
Where does a professional translation services company feature in all of this? Professional translation services agencies are increasingly being contacted by brands and companies to translate their websites, social media material and advertising content in order to achieve a bigger reach. Professional translation services companies have come to understand how crucial it is to deliver to their clients professionally translated content: in order to reach out to bigger markets, tourist destinations, internet users, or other customers, the need emerged to translate various regulations, guidelines, adverts, and other material into numerous languages or at least, in those languages used in the target markets.
However, these advances in information and communication technologies including social media have also brought around some unexpected challenges. One of the challenges related to social media is the terminology that it introduced. Since the major players are American companies, the jargon is in English. Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Plus, Instagram, Pinterest and so forth are English-based social networks and they also use specific terminology. For example, on Facebook you “like” an article, but you can also count the “likes”. Translating this terminology might be a conundrum for some languages, including in Maltese which already employs quite a big number of loan words. Translating such terminology would require the translator to be creative and make sensible and user-friendly choices when tackling the challenges of non-equivalence. Have you ever thought how you would choose to translate “like” in your language, if you do choose to translate it?
Do you have any content you wish to translate before uploading it on your website or your social media platfom? Contact a professional translation services company such as Euris Consult Limited on translations@eurisconsult.com for your free quote.
