The Importance of Effective Translations in Product Packaging

Product packaging plays a vital role in marketing a product. Besides creating a good first impression, a good product packaging can enhance your brand recognition. Moreover, when you expand operations into different countries around the world, creating the same effect with your packaging is crucial. To do this, you want to ensure that every person that comes into contact with your products is able to understand your message in order to create a connection with your brand. And, that is where product packaging translation comes in. However, you don’t just stop at translating your product packaging, you have to ensure that it is done effectively. Here, we look at why effective product packaging translation is important.

Avoiding embarrassing mistakes

Product packaging is an important element in marketing your products in different markets. A simple mistake could break your business or cause loss of revenue. When expanding to different markets around the world and translation becomes necessary, getting the translation right is essential. Moreover, effective translation leaves no room for mistakes. Imagine getting the ingredients and component translation wrong, especially for food, medicine or cosmetics. It can lead to serious health problems and even loss of life.

Translation experts can help you determine if your translation such as the brand name or slogan is difficult to understand or the translated version is offensive to your target audience. A good example of a mistake that effective translation could have solved is the KFC slogan, finger-licking good. When translated in Chinese, it read eat your fingers off, something that didn’t resonate well in the market.

Make sure your translations are professional and idiomatic.

Compliance with the labeling legal requirements

Labeling requirements differ from products to countries and regions. Some regions such as the European Union even go further to identify the minimum font size required. In the cannabis industry, for instance, rules are clear for what should be included in the label including a warning message, specific product information and the standardized cannabis symbol. Leaving anything out can lead to legal tussles and fines.

Effective translation involves working with subject matter experts who understand the legal labeling requirements for different industries and countries. In addition, a reliable translation company can shed light on the languages that are allowed in each country that you are targeting.

Effective localization

Maintaining the overall feel and look of the packaging is important for brand recognition and consistency across different countries. However, cultural differences is something that you have to deal with when operating internationally. Moreover, it is something that you need to keep in mind when it comes to product packaging translation. It is important to make sure that your products are presented in a way that resonates with the local target market.

Effective translation ensures effective localization. Experts who are highly knowledgeable not only in the target language, but also the different cultures involved help align the product packaging with different cultures. That’s why e-learning translation has been a major help when it comes to translating the content because the diversity of the content is growing on a large scale.

Besides translating the language, they do a careful assessment of the images, symbols, colors, expiration date formatting and instruction formatting among others. This eliminates confusion and cultural nuances that might offend the users in the target market.

Successful transcreation

Sometimes adapting a product for a new market proves daunting, and reimagining everything from packaging and brand name to slogan becomes the best route. This is where transcreation comes in. Transcreation helps make the product more natural to the market. However, it requires a great deal of expertise and creativity that can only be possible with a knowledgeable translation team.

Work with the experts

It is important to keep in mind that the formatting might change with translation. Translating to some languages might result in more words, which requires extra space. Additionally, translating to languages such as Arabic, which reads from right to left might require adjustments in the design and layout. That is why working with a desktop publishing expert is necessary. For cannabis businesses, working with a cannabis packaging company is necessary in getting the best design of the packaging.

Conclusion

Product packaging is important in the buying process. It is ideally what gives potential buyers the final nudge to purchase a product. This is why it is important that the buyers understand the message that it carries. Effective product packaging translation makes this possible by ensuring correct translation and transcreation. It also helps with localization to ensure that the packaging sits well with different cultures.