22 Dec Translation and cultural adaptation: the best way to sell in other countries

• To be able to sell in the different Amazon stores, it is necessary to adapt the content to the language of each country.
• This process goes beyond literally translating terms and words, as you need to understand how shoppers think when searching for products on Amazon.

One of the main advantages of selling your products on Amazon is that you can do it globally and reach billions of people around the world. But, this is not as simple as simply having your products hanging in the store of each country, but you also have to make it easier for customers to find them.

To do this, it’s essential that you translate every aspect of your products, from the title, bullet points , and description; to A+ pages, the Store or the Brand Story.

But this goes beyond simply entering all the texts into a translation engine (such as Google Translator) because not all countries search for things in the same way.

For this reason, it is ideal to have native translators, such as those from the Nozama Solutions team, who culturally adapt the content from one country to another. Want to know more about the importance of this? Read.

Translating alone? No! Also culturally adapt

One of the most common mistakes when listing products in other languages is to literally translate all the words from one language to another, because different terms are used to search for the same things in each place.

For example, in our country the word “monitor” may be used, while in France “screen” is used. This is something that also happens within our own language, as it happens in the case of Spain and Latin America when talking about “car” and “car” or “mobile” and “cellular”.

The same goes for clichés or nods to popular culture. The saying “God helps those who get up early” cannot be translated into English as “God helps those who get up early” because in Anglo-Saxon countries, although they could understand it, it would be meaningless. In the same way, “The early bird catches the worm” would sound bad to Spanish speakers. Can you imagine going to buy an alarm clock on Amazon and coming across that phrase? What face would you have?

For this reason, Nozama has native translators, who are able to fully understand and comprehend the context in which each product is placed in order to adapt it in the best possible way to their native language. In this way, they are able to convey exactly the same as what the content creator does in Spanish, making the communicative intention the same regardless of the language.

This process is called cultural adaptation and is much more complex than the mere literal translation of content.

How does the translation team work?

Nozama’s team of translators has a total of eight native speakers: two to translate into Italian, two for French, two for German, one for English and the general coordinator of the entire team.

She is in charge of managing the workflow and the orders that come in to translate. The process is as follows:

• First of all, the creation team writes the content following the instructions of the client, the marketing team and the Growth Strategy Analyst in order to maximize sales and to adjust as best as possible to the characteristics of each product and the chosen strategy.
• Once the client has given the go-ahead to the content created, it is sent to the translation team and the platforms on which it is going to be sold are indicated in order to translate it into the necessary languages.
• From the coordination, the respective translators are reviewed, organized and assigned to begin the process. Files are split and translated by separating titles, bullet points , and descriptions to properly conform to the respective character limits. In addition, each translator has to carry out new keyword research in their language to find the keywords used in each region and thus culturally adapt the content so that customers find it when searching for it. In the same way, they must study and know the products so that the translation is as faithful as possible to the original information.
• The work is carried out through the XTM tool, which works together with the DeepL translation engine and allows them to speed up the process thanks to the creation of translation memories. This is very useful, especially when working with large catalogs of similar products, since the system is able to recognize the percentage of matches of the segments and allow the person in charge not to have to be translating the same thing all the time. However, you should always check the matches and memory options to validate the match and avoid any failures.

Finally, when the content is translated and optimized, it is put back together in a single file that is uploaded to the Amazon marketplace in each country.