When you travel to a new country, sometimes you have enough time and guidance to get well-versed in its language and sometimes you don’t. Often, people make do with symbolic equivalents or interpretation guides to help them through. It’s after all, just about a vacation that you can float by. But travelling to a new market, like China, is not a vacation. At least not at the initial stages.
What you need is a good Chinese translation service. If you are introducing your product to a new, yet a humongous market like China, you cannot ignore the perils of non-translation. Your website or app would need to get draped in the fabric of this local culture, language and colloquial alignment. If you want your product and communication to work seamlessly, there is no need to learn Chinese from the scratch. But that does not mean you don’t need to localise for the Chinese market. You need a professional expert who knows this market and a bouquet of services that can take care of this challenge with a rich inventory of translation experts who are adept in both the languages – the source language of your country and the target language of the new market. Save your brand from the dragon fire.
China, in particular, is a market where brands tiptoe with extra caution and care. Marketers are wary of wrong steps around polysemy i.e. words that have several meanings as well as synonymy i.e. different words that have similar meanings. Some major and world-ruling brands have often paid a huge price in terms of brand equity and resistance in this market because they jumped the same taglines, slogans, and instruction manuals that they had in source market, without ascertaining how they sounded in a Chinese context. The language here may have a different vocabulary and some words, seemingly harmless or impressive, can sound completely different and risky in a Chinese translation. Hence, brands and communication experts tend to walk on eggshells to avert semantic dangers of antonymy, hyponymy or hypernymy as well.