Image courtesy of wordwealthy.com

Earlier this week I enjoyed reading a post called ‘The Most Overused Buzzwords and Marketing Speak in Press Releases’ over at Adam Sherk’s blog (discovered courtesy of @Betti_Moser). Reading the post, it really struck me that high ‘bleurgh’ factor buzzwords like synergy, and dynamic tend to rear their ugly heads in languages other than English, too.

When I translate French press releases into English, for example, I can usually see straight away that the ‘bleurgh’ factor could be reduced by about 70%. The tone of French press releases is often a lot more gushing and flowery than you’d normally see in English, so that’s one challenge. But the individual words themselves present a second, delicious challenge.

Synergie and dynamique are of course words with French origin, but do they really mean anything in either language, or are they just linguistic padding? I suspect that in both languages they are used in marketing texts to give the reader a warm fuzzy feeling about the product or service being sold. In fact, here’s an aside thought: how true would it be to say that use of these words in English marketing texts is to some extent a result of unimaginative translationease creeping into English? We’re all guilty of letting these words slip in, they’re part of our collective marketing vocabulary, and to a large extent we expect to see them. But we could probably all use them a little more sparingly (and I include myself in ‘we’!) and focus instead on packing in the information-bearing words.

I’m all in favour of warm fuzzy feelings as a marketing technique, but let’s not forget that in the highly competitive, fast-paced world we live in, consumers and customers are looking for the FACTS, presented in a digestible, appealing way. My personal view is that as a wordsmith (whether you’re translator, copywriter or writer), your mission if you choose to accept it is to use words to craft something that is a pleasure to read while conveying information in an unambiguous way.

Playing with words in this way is an art, and it takes time to perfect it. For help with copywriting, and writing in general, I highly recommend ‘Write to Sell: The Ultimate Guide To Great Copywriting’ by Andy Maslen.

So which foreign language marketing buzzwords irk you the most? For me, it has to be synergie. Bleurgh!

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) deals with optimising websites for people who use search engines such as Google, Yahoo or Bing. If you’re wondering what this has to do with translation, read on…

What is SEO?

SEO is centred around the ‘natural’ (or ‘organic’) search listings shown in a search engine results page. This is distinct from ’sponsored’ results (coloured red below) also seen on a search results page.

Sponsored results can be paid for by companies that want their website to appear when someone performs a search for a particular word or phrase. However, natural search results are determined by proprietary algorithms, and companies cannot pay to appear in the listings for these search results.

SEO can help websites to improve their positions in the natural results for certain search phrases (or ‘keywords’), which can significantly increase the number of visitors coming to a website.

So why is this important to translators?

As members of the translation industry know better than most, translating from one language to another is not simply about copying a text word for word into another language. As content on the internet grows, the need for quality translation services naturally grows with it.

As with any other discipline, writing for the web requires certain skills that may not be immediately obvious. Firstly, usability is an issue – usability guru Jakob Nielsen sums it up perfectly under the heading How users read on the web:

They don’t

Although this study was undertaken 12 years ago now, the fundamental principles hold true; you can’t write content for the internet in the same way as you do for paper. On the web, reading habits are vastly different, and this must affect the way we write or translate.

Secondly, findability is a consideration; if nobody can find your translated content on the internet, why was it translated? This is where even a basic knowledge of SEO can come in handy. Beyond the technical aspects of a website, SEO also deals with linguistic aspects of a website’s content.

One of the first processes SEOs undertake when optimising a website is keyword research, which analyses the language people use when searching for a particular product or service. By focusing the language used on a website to what people are actually searching for, the website’s content becomes more likely to appear in the natural search results and attract visitors.

As a starter for ten, a couple of free online tools that translators may find useful when translating online texts can be found with Google Insights and Google Trends.

Google Insights for Search

Both of these tools offer international data on searcher behaviour over the last 5 years. Data can be narrowed down to country and city level, and may be useful when researching terminology usage. For example the image above shows that more people are using the phrase “mpv” than “people carrier”, although the gap between the two phrases has narrowed since 2004.

Further reading

There is a huge number of free resources available on the net if you’re interested in learning more about SEO. Unfortunately the quality of information found on a the majority of blogs and forums is at best poor at often misleading if not wrong.

However, the links below are some of the best places to start:

• Official Google SEO Starter Guide – a useful reference to the basics, available in 40 languages.
• Google Webmaster Central blog – a must-read blog for anyone running a website.
• Search Engine Land – leading search engine news website.
• Matt Cutts’ Blog – Google’s head of Webspam blogs about a number of issues that affect webmasters.
• SEOBook – leading SEO blog; highly recommend buying the book for a detailed guide for anyone learning about SEO.

What have been your experiences of SEO? How much do you know about the inner workings of Google? For more discussion on SEO, check out Rob’s blog at robbiehammond.com. Feel free to leave any SEO-related questions in the comments below and Rob will answer them.

In case you hadn’t guessed from the name, Rob is my other half