Many e-commerce retailers want to expand cross-border. Marketplaces such as Amazon and eBay are making it easier than ever to sell overseas and there are foreign marketplaces such as Cdiscount and Zalando which offer huge opportunities for online sellers. The first step of expanding into a new e-commerce marketplace is translating your listings, but too many online retailers use tools such as Google Translate to translate their content. Machine translations are free and quick, but they do more damage to your brand than they are worth. Amazon is a competitive environment and your listings need to be fully optimised to convert sales, so having high quality human translations is paramount. Here are a few reasons why human translations are so important to international e-commerce retailers. Make your brand stand out on marketplaces Standing out on e-commerce marketplaces is essential and therefore the quality of your listing or product page has never been more important. You have more than likely spent a lot of time on your content in your domestic marketplace, ensuring your tone and brand message are on point, so it is essential this doesn’t get lost in translation. Machine translations cannot translate tone. Most businesses write with a specific audience in mind and therefore a certain tone and emotion are used. When a human translation translates a text, aspects such as tone are considered and are conveyed in the translations. Machine translations cannot do this, and your brand message would be lost. There are certain words and phrases which, if used, may better translate what the original author intended. This is something machine translation currently lacks. Translation Machines are unable to differentiate brand names within a text. For example, the brand name “Head” would be translated as “Tête” by a machine translation, causing confusion in the listing. This can be easily avoided using a human translator. Nuances of Language In most languages, a word can have several meanings. The only way to guarantee that the correct meaning is understood and translated is by using a human translation service. A lot of the time, the translator will be able to work out which is the correct meaning, but sometimes there will need to be contact between the translator and the client, something Clarity E-Commerce Translation can offer. Professional translators understand the idiomatic differences between their languages. Machine Translations Stand Out & Put Customers Off Your product titles and product descriptions will be published on marketplaces/websites for potential customers to see and read. By having badly translated content, you are already at a disadvantage. Bad translations stand out to native speakers. Think to yourself, would you buy a product which had “gobbledegook” content in English? That will be what you’re asking your customers to do. Market-Facing content already looks and reads great in your native language. Shouldn’t it look and read in the same effective way no matter what language it is in? Cost of E-Commerce Translations Clearly, machine translations are free. But it is always worth think of translations as an investment. You invest in high-quality e-commerce software ; you invest in the best product photography and you more than likely invest in digital marketing. Translations should be no different. Your product content is visible for everyone to see and it is likely that this content will stay the same for a number of years, so it is worth having the best content possible to maximise sales on both marketplaces and your e-commerce website. Conclusion – Higher Quality Translations at a Lower Price Working with Clarity E-Commerce Translation will not only get you the best quality translation, but also a detailed expertise of both languages and a wide range of knowledge of e-commerce platforms. All translations are carried out by native speakers and then are proofread by a second native speaker at no extra cost.