Writing for an International Audience

For English speaking manufacturing companies or distributors, selling your products or services to customers across the world can be difficult without a website that speaks in their native tongue. With technology continually advancing, being a global distributer or manufacturer has become easy. Yet writing for an international society is not as easy as writing for your customers next door. According to a leader in international translation, if you want your website to be translated correctly without confusing or offending your end-reader, there are a lot of things to avoid when writing your initial text in English.

Avoid colloquial expressions. This one can be difficult, especially when you don’t even realize you use them. Many expressions seem commonplace when really they are only standard for your geographical area or culture. For example, the phrase “ignorance is bliss” is easily understood to many English speaking people. However, the phrase is not easily translated to other cultures. On that note, also avoid jargon, slang, and abbreviations as they are usually not able to be translated. U.S. slang would include words such as pop, schlep, awesome and like.

Avoid words with more than one meaning or words that won’t translate to the language you’re writing for. Example, the Japanese avoid the word “no” as much as possible and many Southeast Asian dialects do not even have a translatable word for “no”. Words such as pound have at least four different meanings in the United States and sometimes, the meaning of the word you are using is untranslatable. So choose words that are easily switched over to your end language.

Avoid humorous writing. Consider when you write an email. When you are writing sarcastically or humorously and you’re unsure if the recipient will grasp that, what do you do? When writing for friends or others who understand that what you’re writing is not supposed to be taken literally, it’s okay to write with humor. However, when writing for a wide range of different people, humor is not easily grasped from one person to the next. When writing text on your website that is to be translated, humor is often taken literally because it does not easily interpret.

Avoid U.S. Customary Units of measurement. Nearly every country outside of the United States uses the metric system along with many American industries that use the metric system to easily correspond with international clients. This form of measurement is easily understood globally whereas U.S. customary units are not. ISO certification requires metric measurements and companies using this certification often deal internationally so the metric system is standard.

Rather than offend or confuse your translator and end-reader, choose writing that is short, simple, precise, professional, and in active tense. With correct grammar and punctuation added in, text is much easier to translate to other languages.

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