Localization of Multilingual Promotional Videos: Key Strategy in Marketing
While digital world and technology keep developing every day, videos are still the most important and effective marketing strategy for companies operating in various sectors because when it comes to conveying “what is wished to say” to the target audience in foreign countries, even though English is still considered as a global language, it is not enough anymore to work in “a single language.” Besides, studies have shown that videos make 80% of internet traffic, which once again underlines the importance of videos localized in different languages.
What is a promotional video and why is it important?
A promotional video, also known as a promotional film, is a video made for conveying information about products, services and missions to potential target audiences that have not yet discovered the brands of a company. The message is crucial to be interpreted correctly as the goal is to catch target audiences’ attention.
What to keep in mind when localizing multilingual promotional videos
Firstly, we would like to remind what localization means as it is often confused with the act of translation itself. Localization is to go over the translation and language boundaries by adapting the original (source) content to areas, regions and countries. In other words, it is an adaptation in the target language as regards the target audience and cultural and regional characteristics.
Source (original) content: The most important step of localizing a promotional video is the source content e.g., texts, pictures, graphs, numbers, music, sounds, subtitles etc. In order to set out to localize a promotional video in a due and goal-oriented way, what needs to be done first it to prepare the source content systematically and understandably because a quality localization work requires correct interpretation of source message.
It is also important that the source content be easily localized in every language, which allows us to go over the translation and language barriers more easily.
Habits and beliefs of target audience: We firstly defined the localization and stated that the end goal was the adaptation in target culture. For example, in some conservative Islamic countries clothing is of utmost importance as regards the religion. For this reason, if a promotional video aimed at these countries is to be localized, it is advisable to consider the visuals and expressions in the video again and rearrange them according to the beliefs of the target audience. In other words, it is essential to do some research on the sociocultural characteristics of the target culture and its way of perceiving the message.
Preferences of the target culture: When localizing a multilingual promotional video, preferences in the target market should definitely be taken into consideration. For example, usually in Russia and Germany videos are rather dubbed than subtitled. One should therefore, when localizing a promotional video, focus on the preferences of the target audience before choosing one of the subtitle, voice-over or dubbing options.
Cultural differences and sensitivities: Every target audience has their unique cultural characteristics and sensitivities, which obliges the content of a promotional video to be adapted to the target culture. We would like to illustrate the importance of cultural differences and sensitivities with an example: The car brand BMW made a big mistake in its promotional video targeted at the United Arab Emirates, causing offence to their national values. The promotional video begins with Al Ain Football Club members singing the national anthem of the UAE. After a moment a sound of a car is
heard, and footballers stop singing the anthem and go running to the BMW car. As a consequence, UAE regarded this situation as offence and protest against its country and its anthem. BMW had to in turn retract and altered the promotional video, which was quite offensive for the target audience.
Varying language usage: Date format, money and measure units, numbers, symbols, colors may vary depending on the country. As a result, if a promotional video contains one or more of these elements, it should absolutely be adapted to the target language. For example, percentage in Turkish is expressed as %100, but in French 100%.
Language structure: One of the major challenges of video localization is when a target language contains more characters than the source language. In other words, if translation of a subtitle is longer than the source, it takes more space on the screen. Consequently, in order for the target audience not to miss the subtitles before the scene changes, the number of characters of the translation should duly adjusted.
Apart from that, as you may know, Arabic is structurally quite different than Latin alphabet and written from right to left. It is therefore necessary to keep the structural differences of languages when localizing a promotional video in Turkish into Arabic.
Why a professional translation service is necessary when localizing multilingual promotional videos
Promotional videos are usually the first medium of bringing brands, products, services, and new potential target audience together. For this reason, it is essential to convey fully and correctly every detail of the content of the video. A wrongly and incoherently localized video may cause loss of target audiences’ trust at the very beginning and even ruin the brand’s reputation, resulting in financial and moral damages.
When you speak to someone in a language they understand, you appeal to their mind, but when you speak in their mother language, you appeal to their heart. – Nelson Mandela
