Europe has been the home of many high-end fashion and luxury companies. Yet, in recent years it has not been the prime market for these companies, thanks to China and the United States. However, since the pandemic, there have been some strong signs that Europe has begun to gain back some of the prominence it used to command in this market.
The big question now is whether luxury companies understand the European customer and if they are ready to serve accordingly. A critical part of any company’s marketing effort is content. In this post, we’ll talk about why you need multilingual content to succeed in this market and how you can go about creating it.
Strongly multilingual
Europe is a multilingual market and its people are used to consuming goods and services in their own language. According to the Flash Eurobarometer of the European Union (EU), 90% of European internet users prefer to surf the internet in their own language. Though 55% at least occasionally use a language other than their own when online, 44% feel they are missing interesting information because web pages are not in a language that they understand.
Given such a strong preference for their native tongue, assess your own language-readiness in the markets you are operating in or wish to enter.
In countries that are traditional markets of high fashion such as France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, this preference for mother tongue is only stronger. While they may be mildly tolerant of English, you will be limiting your sales potential by not translating.
Dependence on brand recall and influencers
You may have put in a lot of effort and resources to build your brand. But are you expecting the world from it? Are you trying to make your brand work harder than it can? Same goes with the brand influencers or online influencers you might have recruited. They do represent the sprit of your brand, they are popular with the local audience, and they are doing their work, actually: they manage to get eyeballs and attention, drive people to your website or to download our app. And then, what happens?
Your potential customers are faced with a language other than their own. While the brand marketing or the influencer might have spoken the local language, your website and app don’t. It’s an epic disappointment for the visitor. It’s like a half-kept promise, neither here or there. Visitors will bounce off your website, leaving all your marketing efforts in the lurch.
Do not let your branding efforts or influencer appeal go to waste. Make the most of your marketing with translation. Make sure that you do not offer a broken language experience to visitors and miss a chance of converting them to customers.
Translation is worth it
Lexcelera helped a fast fashion company translate into 16 languages and doubled their sales. That is the power of translation. This is how it works: visitors feel comfortable enough to stay longer on your website/app and explore it. They begin interacting with your products, perhaps not just on the website/app, but also on social media. Thus begins a relationship. There is more trust, awareness, and familiarity which many a time leads to a purchase. Then there are recurring purchases, too, as they keep enjoying and interacting with your products.
Translation reduces time to market
Each season, as you launch your new collection, you want it to reach your patrons everywhere at the same time. If you already have a translation process in place, it’s easy to push the new content through these channels and get translated content. This way, the content is ready and available to support the new products. It does not have to be created afresh for each locale.
Scale up translation efforts
Perhaps you are already translating into a couple of languages. Which means, that you have a translation workflow in place. If you have invested in translation tools and are limiting your translation to just a few languages, think again. You are under-utilizing your investment in translation. Go ahead, maximize translation to maximize your presence in the European market.
Automate multilingual content creation
The world of translation tech has come a long way from doing translation in Excel sheets. You can use a translation management system (TMS) to create workflows depending on content type, language, or other categories. You can upload files that require translation and it will pass through the workflow to the designated linguists for translation and review. Alternatively, solutions are available that can pull fresh content from the source language website and push it to available translators, then take the translated content and publish it on the respective country websites.
Machine translation has gotten much better than what it was even a couple of years ago. The quality level as well as the number of languages that MT can handle has grown. While it greatly speeds up the translation process, some content types may still need to be translated by professional translators. Or, the MT output may need a layer of editing to improve the quality. However, even with post-editing, as MT output editing is called, the amount of time saved is huge.
With the arrival of artificial intelligence (AI)-powered systems, translation management has become more intuitive, if you will. It learns from the changes or edits we make to the translations and subsequently translation quality improves. Thus, the editing effort gradually decreases.
Transcreate for some content types
Transcreation goes beyond literal translation. Some marketing copy, like homepage text or advertising campaigns, need this treatment. They can be based on the original message in the source language, but usually need to be completely re-written to suit the local audience. Website re-designs, including different graphics, might also be required. For transcreation, you need to work with an experienced language partner. They can determine the tone to be used for your visitors and even the right terms, which will suit them culturally and demographically, too.
Why partner with Lexcelera?
At Lexcelera, we have a keen understanding of creating high-quality multilingual copy for premium fashion and personal luxury brands. We use technology to bring better results to our clients on time, while continuing to work with professional translators. We also provide 24/7 coverage, with production offices in Paris, Buenos Aires, and Bangkok.
Are you thinking of extending and empowering your brand’s presence online? Then, this ebook is for you. In this ebook, we discuss how French luxury brands can strengthen their presence online and dominate e-commerce as they have done in the brick-and-mortar world of fashion and luxury.
Vijayalaxmi Hegde
