Newsletters keep us updated and inform us of current offers on our favourite websites. To ensure that every subscriber receives a newsletter in his or her language, the intercontact team translates and localises newsletter promotions for their customers.
The following points are particularly important for our team in doing so:
- Coordination of newsletter terminology and website content
It is of key importance that the newsletter terminology is coordinated with the website content to guarantee consistency when internationalising newsletters. The same applies for uniform terminology with on-going promotions and company activities. Translation memories and termbanks support us in this task by providing translators with similar sentences and terms that have already been translated.
- Reference material for more creativity
The more reference materials that are available for the translation of a newsletter, the better the newsletter can be adapted and localised for the respective country. Additional images, instructions and information about a product optimise the translation.
- Country-specific address
The use of formal or informal address in a newsletter ought to depend on the address common in a country as well as the company’s philosophy, regardless of what the source text uses. As such, a subscriber will be addressed formally or informally, by first or last name, source text notwithstanding.
- Linguistic and cultural aspects
The spelling and terminology in German newsletters need to be adapted for Germany, Switzerland and Austria. The same applies to newsletters for Great Britain and the USA, for Spain and various countries in South America, for Portugal and Brazil and for the Netherlands and Belgium. Native speaker translators guarantee that both linguistic and cultural aspects are taken into account when translating a newsletter.
- Newsletter subject lines
Optimal, creative translation and localisation of subject lines is particularly important for a newsletter, as a subject letter piques the curiosity of a reader, just like the title of a book. In the process, a translator should avoid words that could directly activate the spam filter of the addressee (e.g. free) The bottom line: A newsletter is an important communication tool, and internationalisation can be demanding for both the company and the translator. We have determined that a newsletter is best internationalised when all participants collaborate in a creative way.