This is what you should consider translating content for social media

Today we’ll talk about the challenges and specific features in translating social media content. We will show you how to consider slang as well as cultural and local differences.

Length and complexity

The example below shows how different the amount of characters can be for the same sentence. To say the same thing in different languages can be a real challenge on social media like Twitter, where the amount of characters is limited for your message. Translating from English to Portuguese or German, the amount of characters can increase significantly: 

 

• “My dog ate my homework.” – 23.
• “Meu cachorro comeu meu dever de casa.” – 37.
• “Mein Hund hat meine Hausaufgaben gefressen.” – 42.

Slang

It’s not only important to consider the allowed number of characters on social media, but also your slang. There are words and terms that cannot be translated literally. You need to maintain the context to make your text comprehensible, instead of just translating every word literally. 

Cultural and local differences

A well done translation works as a showroom for companies and proves to the international market that you master your domain. Sometimes you need to adapt your content to the target group. It’s useless to explain an example from Europe to someone in America and vise versa. The aim for a good translation is to transmit the message considering language and cultural differences. 

At alugha we offer everything you need to produce multilingual videos for social media. If you are interested, just send us an e-mail. Or go to alugha.com and create your own free account and start getting your hands dirty right away und fill the world with multilingual content!

Thank you for reading this!

Wilgen and the alugha team!

#alugha 

#doitmultilingual 

#everyone´slanguage