How to Translate Promotions for Multilingual Content Marketing

Ofer Tirosh
Ofer Tirosh
The team at Tomedes translation agency reached out to us and asked if they could try out our translation features. We challenged them to put Easypromos' tools for multilingual content marketing through their paces! Here's an account of their experience from Ofer Tirosh, founder and CEO at Tomedes.

Easypromos makes it a snap for marketers to create sweepstakes, contests, and other promotional games for multilingual content marketing on social media and other digital channels.  Chances are, you’ll start designing campaigns in your familiar mother tongue. But what if you could easily promote yourself in dozens of foreign languages?

Going global with multilingual content used to be a painful and slow process, but no longer. The app makes it easy to translate and localize your promotions so that you can go global and reach foreign markets faster. 

Going global with multilingual content marketing used to be a painful and slow process, but no longer. Easypromos makes it easy to translate and localize. Click To Tweet

We’ll guide you step-by-step through the basics of globalizing your campaign, then cover some best practices and tips for optimizing linguistic quality with translation services or freelance translators to take your campaign to the next level.


A Hidden Treasure Trove of Translation and Localization Tools

At first glance, you may think that Easypromos is an English-only platform. Many of the up-front examples and templates are in English. But dig a little further and you’ll find powerful tools to create and manage multilingual promotions successfully.

When you are planning a multinational campaign, you should always “think globally, act locally”.u003cbru003e Click To Tweet

This may be a cliché, but in our case, it’s essential and practical. The goal is to create a global promotion – or at least one that is not limited to your native comfort zone. Crossing borders and breaking linguistic barriers instantly expands your target market… and grows your potential audience.

By default, Easypromos targets all countries – but why would you want to target foreign language audiences in English? Despite English being the world’s lingua franca, most non-English speakers would much prefer to be addressed in their own language.

Luckily, Easypromos makes it easy to translate your app simultaneously into multiple languages.

To get started with Easypromos translation tools, you’ll need a White Label plan. Click here to learn more about available plans.


How to select languages for auto-translation

You can change the default language of the promotion by selecting an alternative from the drop-down menu. If you want to create a custom lexicon for a specific language, create a dictionary for your promotion.

The dictionary looks like this.

Dictionary Easypromos

You can accept the default translations or replace them with alternative language.

Multilingual entry form

As you can see in this example, the default translation was missing some words in Polish, which in this case is the additional language of the promotion. The platform allows you to add or update translations.

Multilingual entry form

You can use filters to show default translation, translated texts, and pending translations.

Promotions will automatically appear to participants in the language they prefer, as determined by the language settings in their browser. Any texts not translated by the administrator will be displayed in the default language. The participant can opt to change the language of the promotion, if they wish, by selecting from the language settings in the toolbar at the top right of the screen or at the bottom right of the screen, as seen below in this example:

Click here to read a step-by-step tutorial about creating multilingual promotions with Easypromos.


How to manage multilingual promotions and follow up with participants

If you don’t measure results and market your promo, you can’t optimize your results. Luckily, Easypromos lets you filter participation according to the language of the participant in your promotion. This is found in the View Entries section of the menu.

In addition, Easypromos supports multi-lingual communications in email as well. In the Emails platform, you can create emails for each language used by promotion participants. There is a specialized filter for Language, as can be seen below.


How to target countries for multilingual promotions

Easypromos also provides a geographical filter that lets you easily select which countries to target for your promotion.

By default, your campaign is worldwide, as can be seen below:

Localization

But you may well want to focus on a particular location by entering text into the Add Country field.

Localization option

If you wish to focus on a specific country that is mostly linguistically homogenous, such as Greece, you may wish to use Greek as a default language and to dispense with the multi-lingual auto-translation into additional languages.

On the other hand, if you are targeting a country that has multiple languages in use, such as Canada, Switzerland, or the United States, you would be wise to use the country restriction together with the multilingual auto-translation to adapt your message to the preferences of the individual user.


Best practices and tips for multilingual content marketing

Easypromos simplifies multilingual auto-translation for dozens of supported languages, and the default dictionaries do a decent job of rendering your copy in clear and correct language.

However, brand-conscious marketers will usually want to make the extra effort to fine-tune and customize the promotion content to reflect the unique voice of their organizations.

The Easypromos Translation Editor provides a flexible platform for achieving this. What it doesn’t provide, of course, is the translation itself.

Multilingual promotion

There are a few ways to tackle this. Let’s consider them, starting from the highest quality and highest expense down to the lowest quality and lowest expense.

The most quality-conscious will most likely with to turn to a professional translation agency, which basically ensures – and in some cases guarantees – that your translations will be optimized and error-free. Typically, this service will provide a free quote for your job, usually within 24 to 48 hours, so send along a description and be sure to mention that you are using Easypromos and provide a link so the agency knows what it’s getting into, and there are no surprises down the road.

Typically, the agency quote will measure costs by the translated word, usually by the word count of the source document. Agencies tend to charge between $0.10 and $0.20, though this will vary depending on language, industry, subject matter and more. The advantages of working with an agency is professionalism and responsibility. As a rule, translation and localization agencies deliver the product on-time and on-budget. You don’t want excuses or surprises.

This one of the risks when working with Freelance marketplaces like Upwork or Freelancer. You can mitigate the risk by carefully filtering and vetting the translators on offer there according to their ratings, reviews, and experience with marketing promotions. Here, too, mention EasyPromos as the platform with which you are working. You may get lucky and find someone with specific experience with EPA. Freelancers will tend to be less expensive than professional agencies, usually $0.05 to $0.15 per source word, but let the buyer beware. It’s always a good idea to hire two freelancers for each target market, one to proof the work of the other.

A final option is for the budget-conscious, and that is to use machine translation. AI-powered neural machine language (NML) applications, like Google Translate and DeepL — have come a long way in recent years, but they still have a ways to go before they compare to an expert mother-tongue human translator. Since EasyPromos has already made the investment in multi-lingual translations, the added value is less. However, they are useful when, for one reason or another, you want to personalize the default translation of a dictionary entry, and (of course!) to save money.