Translation company or Communications company?

Translation company may sound a tad old-fashioned… and the term “translation company” itself is a little associated, in many minds, with a dusty office where a solitary professor-type person sits among dusty piles of paper, struggling with strange expressions in an even stranger language. I think it’s true to say that translation has evolved as a tool and profession since that image was first imprinted on our minds.

Translation companies have a new role to play

Nowadays translation companies are more like communication firms, or at least they should be. This is a change that is only natural when working with customers who want to reach out to foreign markets. We have to adjust our services to their needs. We can’t just work with true translations anymore. We should think more about target groups, target culture, values, type of product/service and type of business model (if one exists) and adjust each translation accordingly. Some other aspects you might not think about when you hear the word translation, are e.g. the layout, the design and the choice of pictures.

Hey, can’t I just send you a document!

Sometimes you can do just that, send a simple document and get it back, just translated. It worked that way in the old days (in our world that’s about 30 years ago) when documents were sent only by regular mail, or in rare cases by fax. And when the job was done, you sent it back the same way. But even then you sometimes needed to discuss the text or adjust it to the target group.

Our job as a translation company has become that of converting information into communication so that the target group understands and listens to the message, and our customers become satisfied with the result.

To do this we need knowledge about technology, design, languages, communication, and business. But you can still call us a translation company, or a communications company if you like, cos we actually miss those stacks of dusty paper a bit.