The future of many businesses is found through international trade, and that is not only the case for the biggest businesses in the industry either.
Small businesses in niche markets and entertainment companies will often seek out business from enthusiastic buyers in other countries, and the best way to engage with them is in their own language.
This is why there is a considerable need for translation services even for businesses that do not have a large international footprint. Whilst English is the most widely spoken language, it is only the third most natively spoken, an important difference when it comes to marketing and sales.
When selling products in other countries, there is typically a wide range of legal information required to comply with local laws. For example, ingredient lists need to be in at least one (sometimes all) of a country’s official languages on food products.
In that sense, translation improves engagement by making it legally possible to engage with a product in the first place, but there are much broader ways in which a translation is important.
The most common use of translation for businesses is in their marketing and branding materials, and this work is not something that can necessarily be taken lightly.
Doing the bare minimum in terms of machine translation will at best lead to somewhat tepid, unengaging content. At worst, you end up with infamous mistakes and blunders.
Whilst the most famous example of this, Pepsi’s “Come Alive” campaign allegedly translating in China to a claim of ancestral necromancy, is unconfirmed, there are many cases of marketing accidentally causing offence through careless mistranslation.
The Hyundai Kona, for example, translates in Polish to “Hyundai is dying”, which was somehow one of the less offensive translations of the name, which led to a hasty name change in some countries to the Kauai or the Creta.
Ultimately, cautious translation with multilingual experts avoids these issues and allows for rhetorically similar slogans to be designed instead.