Marketing Strategy
BETH WORTHY | December 22, 2020
Most influential organizations need international market research as it helps formulate growth strategies and decision-making processes. Market research translation allows businesses to understand clients’ expectations, conduct competitive analysis, make educated business decisions, and much more.
Surveying multilingual consumers is challenging in multiple ways, requires language expertise, and has zero room for errors. A single mistake, miscommunication, or misunderstandings can adversely impact a company’s progress in local and international markets. Many organizations hire business translation services firms for their expertise in the sector.
Here are some do’s and don’ts of translating market research to understand the complexity of the task.
The Do’s:
1. Native Speakers
When translating surveys, questions, and instructions, working with native speakers allows questionnaires to sound more natural and helps respondents feel comfortable when answering. Additionally, having native translators who have or are living in your target research area will help them understand the respondents better. Your translators will understand the local language and colloquialisms as well as make the questionnaire easily accessible.
2. Background Information
Your market research translation services firm should have all the necessary background information to understand your research scope and objective, along with ensuring its accuracy. Your translators should know what kind of information you need from respondents to ask the correct questions in the target language. In addition, the linguists who translate the answers would also require a complete discussion to comprehend the precise meaning of the statements made.
3. Avoid Leading Questions
Ensure that your survey has minimal leading questions, if any. Such questions decrease the accuracy of your research by guiding respondents toward specific answers. Typically, leading questions might confuse your respondents. They might answer in a different way than they would in normal circumstances. This may alter your research results and give you an erroneous image of the local market, which can impact your company’s positioning adversely in the long term.
4. Review of Target Participants
Depending on your survey region, you may need to adapt your research methods to include real-time conversations, phone interviews, besides online questionnaires. You may need to create new classes of participants for your study due to population structure variations. If required, you can reorganize your target audience categories, their number, and how you contact them.
5. Test Study Methods
Your business translation services team should test the questionnaire on a sample before you go live to ensure that all your respondents understand the instructions and questions. This also helps you avoid vague messages and poorly translated, indistinct questions. Invest some extra billing hours in testing to ensure the accuracy of your research.
The Don’ts:
1. Not Going Beyond Word-to-Word Translation
Market research documentation involves surveys, questions, videos, interactive content, and more. Along with terminology and grammatical rules, translators require details, like the respondents' voice pitch, body language, and idiomatic expressions for successful translations for the project.
2. Overlook Cultural Aspects
Researchers cannot ask the required questions or conduct a qualitative analysis of the answers without cultural insight. They simplify communication between the respondents and the translator and enable you to represent the local market accurately. Integrating cultural nuances into the research helps you create an emotional connection with the respondents and results in more accurate answers for your analysis.
3. Ignore Data Security
Adhering to data security protocols builds trust among your local audience and reduces the risk of problems with local authorities. If your questionnaires have sensitive data, avoid any data security breaches. This builds trust among your local audience and reduces the risk of issues with the law. If you take assistance from a language service provider, they should ensure that your research results and the respondents’ data are protected. Usually, your translation agency will have strong data security measures to keep your files safe and secure.
4. Forgetting to Proofread
Translating market research involves concepts that cannot always be compared in all languages, brand perceptions that differ with the region, varying local social norms for communication, and several other aspects that influence the translation and localization process. Get survey results checked and proofread by the research team before sharing them with your management and stakeholders. This ensures that analysts use accurate data to make their predictions and removes any mistakes from the document.
5. Have Fixed Deadlines
Your market research results will determine your product launches, fresh marketing strategies, and development. Proper documentation for multilingual market research needs time and patience, as rushing through the entire process can be counterproductive. Rushed translations and skipping critical phases of research might result in the omission of essential data and altering the analysis results. This could lead to a false assurance that pushes you in the incorrect course.
Multilingual market research requires translating both the instructions and surveys that enable you to investigate local markets and local respondents' data.
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