For Western companies wanting to enter Thailand, this market presents multiple challenges. To adequately address them, brands need to change or adapt marketing and communication strategies to the preferences of the Thai market. When it comes to brand communication, localising is about making the content sound authentic and creating a connection with the target audience.
The product style and marketing message must be tailored to local tastes. Insensitivity to aesthetic standards can offend, produce an unfavourable image, and render marketing activities ineffective or harmful.
To properly internationalise a business, many assets need to be skilfully translated, including social media content, everything related to SEO (tags, URLs, keywords, etc.), descriptions of products and services, and the marketing and advertising campaigns themselves. To get this done, it is not enough to simply give a translating agency the source text of the copy — the translators need to be briefed on the campaign’s marketing goals and be provided with the original copywriting guidelines, including information on the tone of voice.
Localising marketing copy or PR texts in another language requires more than just translating texts word by word by a fluent speaker of the target language. To avoid costly mistakes, it is important to understand the local social and cultural context.
The procedure that aims to preserve the original intent, style, tone, and context when translating a document from one language to another is frequently called “transcreation.” As a component of transcreation, localisation entails fine-tuning the content to account for customer preferences across cultural contexts.
It is important to avoid cutting corners with transcreation because the results will inevitably suffer. Translate your core press material into the local language and take your agency’s advice on using interpreters. If you are launching in Thailand, use Thailand transcreators rather than interpreters.