If your business is heavily web-based, you’re probably already aware of the potential of the Internet to reach and quickly reach an international audience through online advertising. To cater to your international customers, you will likely have your website translated into the major languages ​​spoken in the markets you are targeting. For many people, this part is relatively easy: you send your copy to the translator, who will provide you with a quote based on the volume of the text and any other special requirements you may have, such as verifying the translated text of web forms once. they are online. But have you considered how you will handle the translation of your online advertising material?

Done correctly, translation of online collateral differs from ordinary translation in a few important ways. First, an important part of the material that will be translated will be the keywords you bid or buy on, rather than the actual ad text. Translating keywords effectively is somewhat different than translating paragraphs of text for reasons we’ll see below. A good ad translator should also work differently than a colleague who works with ordinary text when it comes to the ad copy itself.

This last point may seem the most obvious, but it is worth expanding on. The ad scheme you are using will usually have restrictions placed on it, such as the maximum length of the headlines and other lines of the ad. Their ad copy was likely chosen to sound catchy rather than because a particular literal meaning was important. Therefore, to translate an online ad, it may be more effective to use a rough translation that sounds catchy and meets length restrictions. As an example of the kind of decisions the translator can make, there is a Spanish word that can be used to translate “vacaciones de verano” (“summer”) that is actually shorter than the general word for “vacation”). If the translator knows that your business or campaign is specifically related to the summer holidays (and a good translator will always take the time to understand your business), you can use the shorter word which can be crucial when translating an ad headline with a 25- character limit

The problems related to the translation of advertising keywords may be less obvious. But first think about the process you went through to choose your keywords. He probably started by choosing a few phrases that characterize his business. You may then have expanded this list by considering synonyms, possibly using a tool like Google Trends to find the most likely synonyms a user would search for. He would also have considered which combinations of these synonyms were most likely in English. For example, in British English, the words “hire”, “rent”, and “let” have similar meanings, but “hire” is often associated with industrial vehicles or machines, “rent” with residential property, and “let” with private property. commercial. . Subconsciously, your choice of possible keywords was probably influenced by the grammar of English and the grammar of web searches. For example, he would probably choose “van rental” instead of “van rental” or “van rental”, neither of which is usually grammatical in English. If he were running a vacation company, he might choose “minibreaks Paris” over “minibreaks in Paris,” because he knows that people tend to skip short function words like “at” in web searches.

When it comes to translating these keywords, you may naively think that you can look up the translations of each individual word and do a search and replace on the keyword list. Unfortunately, this will generally not be effective for a number of reasons. Where there are synonyms like “hire”, “rent”, “let” in English, the foreign language probably won’t have exactly the same number of synonyms with a direct mapping between them. (In Spanish, for example, the two verbs “alquilar” and “rentar” can be applied to both vehicles and property.) Therefore, in the foreign language, you may have to consider combinations of words that you did not consider in English, and some combinations may not be feasible.

Some of the grammatical restrictions that affected your keyword selection in English may not apply in the foreign language. For example, in English, the phrase “rental vans” is generally ungrammatical. But in French, Italian, and Spanish (and, indeed, many other languages), the phrase would be common and grammatical, either singular or plural, leading to more keyword combinations to consider bidding on. And in these and other Latin-based languages, compounds are usually formed by inserting the word “de” between the content words (eg “de” in Spanish and French, “di” in Italian). But in web searches, this word can be optionally omitted, so that in Spanish, for example, a Spaniard searching for “car rental” may search for (among other things) “alquiler DE coche” or simply “alquiler coche”.

The subtlest of all is that the grammar of web searches actually differs from language to language. Some of my own research suggests, for example, that Spanish speakers are more likely to include the word “de” among content words than Francophones, and that Spanish speakers are more likely to pluralize words in their searches.

Finally, remember that some online advertising systems offer a keyword tool that will suggest alternatives so you can bid on an initial list. You should also talk to your translator to see if they can help you choose from the list of suggestions and advise you on their meanings when needed.