Culture is, at its most basic definition, the characteristics and knowledge of a particular group of people, encompassing language, religion, cuisine, social habits, music and arts…. To effectively communicate across cultural boundaries and to ensure that the audience has full understanding, translators need to take many elements into consideration. Key to this is making sure that the content is regionally suitable. 

The level of importance professional language translation companies place on cultural considerations shouldn’t be underestimated. When left out of language translation processes, it can result – at a minimum – in miscommunication, hilarity or embarrassment. Depending on the type of faux-pas, brand reputation can be negatively affected and even more serious – legal action may ensue. This article discusses the  importance of culture in translations.

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If you’ve already read our article on how to get a document correctly translated, how to create a glossary, or pretty much any article on how to get benefit from a language service provider (LSP), you may have noticed that collaboration is the key.  You can create a translation style guide on your own. In fact, your company may have already created one for internal purposes. However, a translation style guide is for translating, not for writing original content.  This means that a lot of the work has already been done of you and the translator, because much of the style and what the translators needs to know is already in the content itself. The purpose of the translation style guide is to address anything that the content cannot address directly. 

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