Translation

A customer recently asked me to work on a text that they’d already paid to translate into English. When I opened the document, I immediately identified the problem. It had been translated by a German native speaker. The translator was certainly competent, and there was nothing that I could point to as being inaccurate. But the words didn’t flow. There are two reasons for this.

First, a native German speaker will rarely have the English skills of someone who grew up in an English-speaking environment. It’s why I never translate into German – even though I speak the language very well.

And second and most importantly, most translators are not copywriters. These are two very different skills. Translating marketing texts is a very different skillset than the one needed to translate product descriptions or legal texts.

Copywriting is the art of writing texts that persuade the reader to take action. If you want the reader to pick up the phone and call you, or to sign up for your newsletter, you’ll need to give them a reason to do so. Boring, bland texts won’t do that.

Once I’d retranslated the text and submitted for approval, my customer said, “Ah, now I understand. We had purchased a Lada but thought we were getting a Volkswagen”. It wasn’t that the Lada was a terrible car, and it would get you from A to B – but the VW was certainly the more stylish and comfortable ride.

I know, we are all told to use these contact forms on our websites. But if, like me, you prefer to email directly, here's my email address.

lynn@englishtextservices.de

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