Multilingual Social Media
Social Media Translation
Many social media platforms now offer embedded automatic Machine Translation (MT) tools. While these are often “good-enough” to convey elementary meaning, they often lose audiences when it comes to tone, style and quality. What suffers from such basic translation is clarity of meaning, nuance and precision of language, idiomatic speech, as well as the inability to process abbreviations, concatenation (such as in hashtags). Instead of helping reach global audiences, such automated mistranslations can backfire, exposing companies to target audience detachment, disinterest, or, at worst, angry backlash and derisive mockery.
Human translation of social media, performed by fluent professionals, maintains your corporate brand and message, and, through cultural knowledge and experience in localization for key markets, can help you avoid the perils and pitfalls inherent to relying solely on automated machine translation tools.
As well, when constrained by the limits of certain types of media (Twitter’s 140-character limit being a prime example), translation alone is often utterly insufficient, especially when you have issues of expansion in certain languages such as German. You may need to completely rethink and rework your message to fit in the constraints of the media. Whether that is a tweet or a reworked meme graphic, e2f can help guide you to successfully localize your campaign for the audience you are trying to impress.
Social Media and Online Community Management
Moreover, social media is not one-way. Beyond outbound communications, multilingual social community management is a requirement when monitoring consumer sentiment, crafting responses, or managing customer relations through social channels and messaging apps. Whether your users are on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Renren or Weibo, sharing video via YouTube, Twitch, Facebook Live or Periscope, or messaging via SnapChat, Line, WhatsApp, WeChat, Skype or Blackberry Messenger (BBM), or managing traditional web chat apps and discussion forums, having multilingual community management is a vital component of modern corporate marketing and customer relations.
e2f Can Help!
e2f offers staffing solutions for sourcing vetted, fully-fluent individuals with the language skills you need, as well as full multilingual managed services for entire teams. Contact us at info@e2f.com to ask how we can help you build your brand with diverse communities.