In the post-pandemic world, going digital goes beyond country borders. A big part of expanding a business internationally is to ensure that you are understood in other markets and cultures. Website localization includes many levels of adaptation from content and graphics to navigation and compatibility. In this post, I will focus on content transcreation, which is one of Dragoman’s proudest strengths, and give you a brief and helpful description of how we transcreate your website in English and Turkish.

  • Understanding your needs

Our translators and copyeditors meet your team to discuss your target audience and your preferred communication style. We ask about what kind of an impression you want to create on your potential customers. What is your tone preference? What unique concepts or qualities would you like to highlight to differentiate your business from the competition in local markets? Do you have any specific products or services that should be marketed differently?

Once we set the general tone for your website content, we move on to more specific but essential questions to help build your business identity in the target culture. For instance, do you have an in-house style guide that sets a standard for writing figures, dates, or titles? Any rules on capitalizations or contractions? If you do not have a style guide, we may also help you create one, which can be used not only in translations but any piece of text in your company. This may help you form a more coherent writing style, hence a more coherent brand identity.

  • Creating a consistent and powerful writing style

If you want to your writing to be focused, clear, and influential to evoke positive emotions in customers, Plain English or Turkish is the way to go. Well, what do we mean by plain language?

  1. Using active voice over passive: In the active voice, the subject of the sentence does the action; in the passive voice, the subject receives the action. If you want your customers to take action and choose you, you should prefer the active voice in both languages. The passive voice is needlessly prevalent in Turkish, which weakens your connection with your audience. And when translating from Turkish to English, passive structures are often protected, which leads to a dull, unnatural tone. The active voice, in most cases, especially in marketing copy, would be preferable in English. To learn more on this topic, you can check out these articles: Passive & Active Voices Troubleshooting and Converting Passive to Active – Translating Audit Reports into English.
  2. Splitting sentences: Any length of text without punctuation should be readable with a single breath. If it can’t be read in a single breath, your sentence is probably too long. In Turkish, there’s a wrong conception that the longer your sentences, the more sophisticated you sound. However, you should be to the point in both languages to make your message clearer and more relevant. For more information, these articles may be helpful: Sentence Splitting – Part 1 and Sentence Splitting – Part 2.
  3. Avoiding wordiness: If you can remove a word from a sentence without changing its core meaning, that word is redundant or unnecessary. Verbosity is a bitter enemy of powerful writing. Check out these articles to learn how fat words or verbs weaken your message: Tips for Turkish to English Transcreation and How not to use a relative clause.

Among the many stylistic choices we make in your website copy, these are the essential ones. Describing what your product or service brings to the table in simple terms that make sense to your customers is crucial to earning their trust.

  • Not just translating but transcreating

What do I mean by transcreation? It means re-creating your content to improve relatability in target markets. We do not translate word-for-word. We may take drastic action with your original sentence structures, formation, or even sequence to sound more natural to the target culture. Apart from training our translators to sound more natural in their first and second languages, we work with native copyeditors in the target language to improve the flow of our translations.

  • Getting your terminology right

We ensure that we use industry jargon and terminology. When there might be more than one word describing a concept, we ask about your preference and record your answer in our cloud translation tool Nubuto. This helps us to achieve consistency across all your texts regardless of the last time you assigned a task to us or the last translator/copyeditor who worked on your project. Your product and service names in the local market are also entered into this system to avoid any inaccurate representation. What’s more, the more we work on your projects, the more terminology we accumulate, which strengthens your brand coherency.

  • Working with you at every step of the way

You can always jump in during the transcreation of your website to watch how the translation process unfolds and leave comments if you would like us to take a different direction with your text. This is made possible by our translation tool, Nubuto, on which you can have an account. Your comments will be instantly visible to any translators or copyeditors currently working on your project so that they can take timely action to avoid any delays.

Contact our teams to get more information on our website content localization service.