Companies around the world are increasingly using Twitter as an online marketing and networking tool. Twitter is a microblogging site where people post ‘tweets’, short messages of 140 characters or less, and it seems that everyone from Barack Obama to your next-door neighbour is twittering. Myself included.
Twitter is effectively a way of having a series of mini conversations and sharing this on the Web. Companies using Twitter to have conversations with customers, prospects and the wider public therefore need to make sure that they continue to convey the same brand messages here as they do elsewhere in their corporate communications. But what about when you need to reach an international audience? Tweets are only very short: are they worth translating?
Online machine translation services and Twitter-based translation services such as Twitrans are available if you want to translate your tweets. Although I see the value of using machine translation when you just need to get the gist of a text, I’m a firm believer that you need highly-skilled translators when you are dealing with texts that are all about building your company’s reputation and that will have an impact on the company’s image. So why entrust your Twitter marketing activities to a machine and get hit-and-miss results? Make sure that you provide quality information in quality language, whatever language you happen to be having your mini conversations in. If you already commission marketing translations, why not try including your Twitter tweets in the translation work that you outsource and see how you get on?
Are you a translator who twitters? What do you think about translating tweets - is it a good idea or a waste of time? Are you someone who regularly has their tweets translated? I’d be very interested to hear your experiences, please feel free to share them here!
Enjoyed this post? Then make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!
{ 1 trackback }
{ 6 comments… read them below or add one }
Interesting point - and I completely agree that quality translations are especially important when you are talking about your company’s image.
However one of the advantages of Twitter is the ‘real time’ interaction - it’s about conversations, not just broadcasts. I’m wondering how well this will work if you are waiting for translations to come through before you can Tweet anything - surely some of the spontenaiety will be lost?
Some of the spontaneity will be lost, I agree. However, I understand that some companies schedule their tweets in advance, so it might work for them. I’m not entirely sure that all business-related tweets should be translated as they are so short and, as you say, based on ‘real-time’ interaction, but I do think that broadcast-style tweets containing serious marketing messages call for a specialist translator so as to avoid any cultural faux-pas.
You bring up a lot of interesting points, especially questioning if it’s even worth translating something so small (and disputably, insignificant). But I think that as Twitter continues to spread across the globe, it will become more and more important. There’s a post here that talks about Tweeting in Spanish (twittereando!) that you might like. http://spanish-translation-blog.spanishtranslation.us/
Or you can use iPhone application Twitter World which can in real time translate Tweets. It uses Google’s AJAX API so it is not as good as human. But it is fast and convenient.
Check it out:
http://tidbit.techievarta.com/tag/twitterworld/
or in iTunes Store
http://bit.ly/Z0uaY
I work for a translation company, and this question is consistently being asked as companies want to create dynamic web 2.0 sites. Another good blog post.
Tweets are definitely worth translating. I often translate popular tweets from Chinese-to-English and vice-versa.
I tested Twitrans before and it gave me a very poor translation. Probably because the rates they pay their translators are very very low. In developed countries, those rates are no different than 0.
taite11 on Twitter