Speaking in your customers language is essential for the success of your marketing efforts. When you deliver a message that’s in their own language, the customers will not only understand it better. But will form a strong bond with your businesses.
Therefore, when you try to localize and translate your website, product, or service to any other language. You must always put your best foot forward. Hence, it becomes necessary to understand each language and what challenges it presents.
Since it’s impossible to cover every language in a single post, we’ve chosen only 4 languages for this blog. And will be talking about some major issues with each of them.
Top Difficulties in Chinese Translation
There isn’t one Chinese – to be specific about your audience. Usually, when we refer to Chinese, we’re referring to the so many versions of it. Based on region, it comes with varieties such as Mandarin, Wu, Gan, Jin, Hui, and Xiang, among others. When doing translation, it’s important to be specific about your target audience. And hire only professional Chinese translation services for your project.
It’s a tonal language – Based on how one utters a word, there are four main tones that drastically alter its meaning. And these tones are as challenging to learn as Latin tenses, agreements, or word order of its grammatical structure.
It uses thousands of characters – To form words and phrases, Chinese uses thousands of characters, with each character taking up one syllable. Styles of writing are also of two types. One is traditional and the other is simplified Chinese. So, always work with experienced translators who understand such nuances.
Top Difficulties in the Malayalam translation
It has mixed vocabulary – Malayalam has borrowed vocabulary from a diverse set of languages. Including, but not limited to, Persian, Sanskrit, Arabic, English, Urdu, and Portuguese. Thus, in order for a professional or company to provide excellent Malayalam translation services. They have to be aware of the vast vocabulary this language uses.
It has complex alphabets – Written in Brahmic script, the Malayalam language uses 42 consonants, 15 vowels, and some other symbols. There are also certain sounds in this language that make it difficult to understand. For accurate document translation services, the translators make sure they understand each alphabet and the sound they represent.
It brings distinct nasal tones – Nasal sounds are an essential component of the spoken Malayalam language. The most typical sound is “me,” and people nasally pronounce it as “ñaan.” In addition, the ‘ña’ sounds similar to the ‘NY’ in ‘canyon.’ Despite the fact that many terms may have comparable versions, they often lead to misunderstanding.
The grammar is quite tough – It has an agglutinative grammar, like other Dravidian languages. Being an agglutinative language means it sequentially adds suffixes to stems to form words that demonstrate grammatical functions. There is no set length or scope of agglutination in Malayalam, and adverbs, adjectives, conjunctions, and postpositions don’t experience any inflection.
Top Difficulties in the Indonesian translation
It often gets tricky – There are a few characteristics of Indonesian that make it more difficult to translate into and from English than other languages. To begin with, we have at least 20 ways to say “you” in Indonesian. This doesn’t exist in English because, in English, we’ve only one way to say “you,”. However, anyone who is familiar with a Romance language, or even another Germanic language, is aware that depending on a person’s rank and other considerations, there might occasionally be two or three alternative ways to say “you.”
Huge amount of numerical classifiers – Another issue that may arise in Indonesian translation is the number of numeral classifiers used in this language. These also exist in English, as in the phrase “twenty head of cattle,”. But they are much more prevalent and complex in the Indonesian language. For instance, there’s a numerical classifier for pens and chalk and another one for pieces of paper and hair. Though they seem useless, the semantic categories utilized here make sense to native Indonesian speakers.
Hard to translate phrases – There are so many concepts that when we try to translate into the Indonesian language, we usually fail. This includes concepts like adventure and feathers. When discussing feathers, for example, the phrase used in Indonesian translates to “bird covering” or “bird coat” Adventure appears to be much more culturally embedded than other terms. Therefore, as with any project, working with a trustworthy and seasoned Indonesian translation services company is the best way to overcome such obstacles.
Top Difficulties in Sinhala Translation
Complex idioms – There are many idioms in Sinhala that are frequently used to express ideas in a variety of contexts. Experts in Sinhala translation services would always make an effort to utilize inequivalent in their translations or exclude such idioms in order to prevent meaningless statements and keep the contextual sense of the text.
Sound system – Sinhala has 14 vowel sounds, with seven being short and seven being long. There are two vowels that are unique to this language. Written in “æ” and “æ” forms, they are not found in Dravidian and Indo-Aryan. Germans regard them as a vowel change brought on by the umlaut. In total, there’re 26 consonants, four of which are prenasalized stops. Except for Maldivian, these prenasalized stops are absent from South Asian Languages. Experts usually attributed them to Polynesian or African languages.
Wrapping up
Every language carries its own set of challenges. To ensure that you communicate things clearly, whether in Chinese, Malayalam, or any other language, you must have an in-depth understanding of the language as well as know how to beat the cultural differences that may come across. Your best decision will be to have a partner on your side that can expertly tackle all the linguistic challenges. Otherwise, you can fall behind in delivering a truly amazing digital experience to your international searchers.