It can be surprising how many businesses neglect packaging translation when implementing a new marketing campaign. What should you consider in your designs?
When creating product packaging, it’s incredibly important to ensure everything is perfect; the packaging itself, materials, colour, you name it – everything adds together to portray the right message. When done the right way, it helps to sell a product and entice a customer to pick it up. If you don’t get things right the first time, you risk losing out on sales.
However, if you’re a larger business, there’s an extra factor you need to consider to ensure you’re reaching every customer you possibly can; packaging translation. Surprisingly, this gets overlooked time and time again as more time is spent on other areas of marketing. The truth is, if you want to expand your business even further, translation is the way to go.
So, what do you need to consider when adapting your product to suit the needs of an expanded audience? Here are five elements you need to consider:
Wording and overall design
You need to ensure the words on your packaging fit the product you’re selling. The translated words need to be accurate, but sometimes, you may be faced with minor problems. If your translated slogan turns out to be longer than the packaging allows, you may want to make a few tweaks.
Without making the necessary changes to your packaging text, you could lose custom and see a failure in your product in different locations. Imagine if you were to see a product in your local supermarket today with grammatical errors and unfinished sentences. Not a big selling point! This is how people in different locations would view your product if the appropriate translations were not carried out.
Put yourself in the shoes of a customer in your target market. From your translations, would they be able to use your product’s instructions and make sense of any safety precautions? Are the different parts of your product labelled up correctly? Your success depends on how well you can communicate with your audience.
Review and validate
Your business can’t just depend on one person’s translation skills. To ensure your product reads perfectly in your chosen new language, seek professional help in global translation services from companies such as Intrawelt. Not only can they check that the text in your descriptions is accurate but they’ll be able to check grammar, the tone of voice and vocabulary to ensure it perfectly matches your product.
Before you even think about releasing your product in a variety of countries, you need your product review complete. Without flawless packaging translation, you’ll just not reach the right people. As well as translation services, it’s important that you check with local linguists in the area to make sure your wording is spot on for your chosen location.
Market and culture
Everywhere your product goes, it needs to be understood perfectly and match the area in terms of culture and audience. While certain colours and shapes work well in one location, they’re not appreciated in some cultures. Sometimes, this can require a whole new packaging redesign as well as amended copy.
To ensure everything runs smoothly, it’s a good idea to test different designs and packaging translation in the form of a survey or trial run of your product. This will give you a genuine response from your new audience and enable you to identify any areas for improvement for you to act upon before the final product is released.
Distribution and regulations
It can be difficult to understand the changes in regulation and rules on distribution in a brand-new market. Keep in mind that you may be required to include legal information when translating your packaging copy and that it’s worth choosing a distributor local to your new market. They’ll be able to answer your questions and ensure everything is perfect before going ahead with distribution.
Take these tips on board when looking at packaging translation
When all the above elements have been met, you’ll be perfectly translated and ready to distribute your product around the world. Keep space in your budget for high-quality, professional translation services if you plan on opening up your business to a whole new market.
