In addition to technical translations, DeFrEnT also translates corresponding marketing texts for customers primarily in the IT, mechanical engineering and plant engineering industries – but we also work for clients in the education and consumer products sectors. Mr Köbel translates
- company and product websites and landing pages
- product and spare parts catalogues
- brochures and flyers
- success stories and use cases
- etc.
All these texts still must conform to company-specific terminology and style and wording guidelines, but they can be translated more freely if this makes the final translation more powerful and effective or if cultural habits and preferences require these deviations, for example because of the way customers are customarily addressed. A full rewrite of your message in the target language would be called a “transcreation”.
Mr Köbel generally creates marketing translations in a multi-tiered process:
- DeFrEnT talks with you about your target group and the desired purpose of the translation to understand your priorities and goals. We will then jointly define style guidelines, e.g. whether to use gender-neutral language in German or whether English “buzzwords” or their German counterparts better fit your corporate identity and the target audience.
- As a first step, we do a draft translation using SDL Trados Studio, which ensures compliance with all defined terms and agreed wordings thanks to the CAT tool’s quality assurance helpers.
- Afterwards, we “fine-tune” the draft outside of the translation environment. In this step, Mr Köbel pays special attention to idiomatic expression and makes changes to ensure that the target text reads less like a translation and more like an original target-language text written for your target group.
- Finally, we follow up with a proofreading cycle after laying the translation aside for a couple of hours, checking the text on another medium (e.g. on a smartphone or a printed version) to track down the last errors.
- Optionally, DeFrEnT can involve a native-speaker colleague to provide enhanced quality thanks to the “four-eyes” principle. The surcharge is based on the colleague’s actual fees for proofreading – as a rule of thumb, you might assume a premium of about one third of the translation costs.
In short: DeFrEnT helps you to achieve your marketing goals at home and abroad by coordinating with you what the end product should look like. To this end, we will be happy to suggest alternative wording at critical points of your text (e.g., eye-catching headings), always explaining what effects your decision will have on meaning, connotations, puns and framing.