Category: Diversity & Inclusion

Why is Localization Important For Your Brand
09/05/2023

Why is localization important for your brand?

Posted on | by Jacqueline De Marco | Leave a Comment on Why is localization important for your brand?

Localization takes the translation process a step further by adapting content, video games, services, apps, online courses, and many different types of products to a specific local market. Alongside translating text, localization involves adapting formats, designs, colors, images, payment methods, cultural references, and any elements that can make an impact by being customized to meet the needs of a new market. 

Keep reading to better understand why localization is so important for your brand. 

Deeper connections and improved customer satisfaction

When you localize content or a product to a local market, you can better meet your customer’s needs in that market and can forge a deeper connection with them. Whenever a customer engages with your brand, you have a chance to build a connection with them. From your product, to customer support resources, to your checkout process, it’s important that your customers feel understood and appreciated. When you localize your brand to their unique market, it’s easier to build a natural connection and to improve customer satisfaction.

Competitive advantage

One way to get a leg up on your competition is to localize your products, websites, and brand materials. If your competitors aren’t already doing this, you’re a step ahead of them. If they are localizing their brand to the same target markets, you don’t want your customers to turn to them.

Let’s look at a company website as an example. Localizing your company website to meet your target market’s needs will make it so they better understand the selling points of your products, how to purchase from you, and what they need to do to access customer support. If a consumer has to choose between making a purchase from a brand that takes localization into account and one that doesn’t, there’s a good chance they’ll choose the brand that is easier to understand and that resonates more with them. 

Improved accessibility

Localization can also help increase your brand’s accessibility. More than 5% of the population is impacted by hearing loss, which makes audio and video content inaccessible to millions of people if there are no subtitles for that content available in their language. When you localize subtitles, you improve inclusion and expand your brand reach in one fell swoop. 

Increased customer base and brand loyalty

The easier it is for a customer to interact with your brand, the more likely you are to attract and retain them. If you want to introduce your brand to a new market, localization is a crucial step to breaking into that market. Using a language that your new market clearly understands is of course a key step to take. But again, localization takes translation a step further. Because localization takes local culture into account, you can use this process to avoid causing offense to customers and to create content and products that are more likely to appeal to them. 

At the end of the day, customers who feel seen and heard will always be more loyal to your brand than customers who feel like a second thought. 

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04/04/2023

What is Language Access and Why is it Important?

Posted on | by Jacqueline De Marco | Leave a Comment on What is Language Access and Why is it Important?

Language access makes it possible for individuals and the businesses or organizations they interact with to communicate when they don’t speak the same language. In some cases, such as with certain federal agencies, language access is actually a legal requirement. Even if language access isn’t required by law, businesses can benefit financially and can improve their customer service efforts and brand reputation by turning to translation services to improve language access for their customers.

Let’s take a closer look at what language access is, why it matters, and how much of the U.S. population it can affect.

What is Language Access?

Language access is an important aspect of accessibility for people with limited English proficiency (LEP). The term language access refers to the ability of individuals to communicate effectively and access information, services, and opportunities in their preferred language. Similar to how certain accommodations must be made for those with physical disabilities (such as businesses having wheelchair ramps), language access is a key element to building an inclusive society.

Why is Language Access important?

Language access can help ensure that LEP individuals have equal access to services and opportunities, all while reducing barriers and promoting inclusivity. This can be especially important in situations where individuals rely on services for essential needs, such as healthcare, education, or legal assistance.

For example, medical patients need to be able to communicate with their medical care team in a language they fully understand. That way, there is no confusion around a diagnosis, treatment, or prescription. Not being able to fully understand medical care can lead to dangerous results. Even medical records and insurance claims can benefit from embracing language access.

Understanding LEP in the US

To better understand why language access matters, it’s important to have context surrounding just how many people this affects in the U.S.

LEP individuals don’t speak English as their primary language and have a limited ability to read, write, speak, or understand English. The U.S. Census Bureau estimates that nearly 21 percent of the U.S. population speaks a language other than English, and of that percentage more than 40 percent speak English less than “very well.”

It’s easy to see how a large amount of the U.S. population could lose equal access to vital education, legal, or healthcare services due to language barriers.

The Takeaway

It is important for organizations and businesses to be aware of the language needs of their customers and clients and to take steps to provide language access when necessary. This can involve providing interpretation services, offering materials in multiple languages, or hiring staff who speak multiple languages. Hiring professional translators to translate content can help improve language access across a wide variety of industries. You can work with a highly specialized translation company to ensure you’re providing clear and correct content to LEP individuals.

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08/03/2023

MAKING PROGRESS FOR WOMEN IN THE LANGUAGE INDUSTRY

Posted on | by Jacqueline De Marco | Leave a Comment on MAKING PROGRESS FOR WOMEN IN THE LANGUAGE INDUSTRY

At Terra, we’re proud to be a women-owned company and to have 72% of all leadership positions occupied by women and non-binary individuals and throughout our company. Overall, we have a 73% representation of women. Which is why celebrating International Women’s Day is so important to us, as is working towards gender equality and women empowerment in the translation industry and beyond.

Some of the Challenges Women Faced and Continue to Face

The UN has defined one of their main Sustainable Development goals as striving to “Ensure women’s full and effective participation and equal opportunities for leadership at all levels of decision-making in political, economic, and public life.”

While you may think numbers in the localization industry are better because the vast majority of translators are women, we still see that leadership positions are mostly held by men. According to Nimdzi, only 17% of the companies featured in the Nimdzi 100 ranking are women-owned or women-run.

Knowing the challenges women historically faced and still face today is an essential step towards awareness, which is necessary to fuel action. In particular, there is still a lot of work to be done in regard to:

  • Gender gap in salaries
  • Gender-based discrimination (being a mother for example, can lead to less fair career opportunities for women)
  • Lack of women representation in leadership positions

Improvement has been made in these areas, but there’s still a lot to do if we want to work towards true equality. According to BoardEx data, only 5% of CEOs are women and 19.2% of corporate leadership team members are female. About 28.2% of board members are female, the study found. However, many of these women were appointed to non-executive roles, which are often centered on board oversight rather than real decision-making power.

What Can We Do to Support Fellow Women?

We’ve come a long way. But the truth is that the progress we’ve seen throughout history is thanks to the contributions that other women have made through the years. So, we encourage fellow women in the language industry to look for local organizations, so they can learn more about the different initiatives and how they can help them reach their goals.

These are a few of the organizations Terra supports:

  • Women in Localization: This nonprofit organization has a mission to foster a global community for the advancement of women and the localization industry by providing networking, education, career advancement, and mentoring opportunities to women in the localization industry.
  • Women in Games: Women in Games aims to build a fair, equal and safe environment that empowers girls and women to join and thrive in the global gaming ecosystem.
  • Chicas en Tecnología: This non-profit organization in Argentina works to reduce the gender gap in technology in that region by motivating and training the next generation of women leaders in technology.
  • Enterprising Women Magazine: A national and global magazine for female entrepreneurs that celebrates achievements by women and provides valuable resources.

These organizations are ones we are proud to support, but there are many others doing good work in this space. Spend some time researching where your volunteer efforts can make the most impact.

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Why the Education Sector Should Embrace Digital Transformation
24/01/2023

Why the Education Sector Should Embrace Digital Transformation

Posted on | by Jacqueline De Marco | Leave a Comment on Why the Education Sector Should Embrace Digital Transformation

The pandemic pushed many traditional educational organizations to enter the online world of digital education. They all dipped their toes into the water by moving classes to Zoom and Google Meet, but the truth is that it takes a lot more than that to meet the demands of a digital generation.

There’s no time like the present for education to catch up with technological advancements to better serve and engage their users—aka learners. There is also a high percentage of teachers leaving traditional education institutions to work in the eLearning industry as of late, which is another factor the education system needs to take into account as they look to the future. Let’s take a closer look at why the education sector should embrace digital transformation.

What Does a Digital Transformation Look Like?

A digital transformation greatly surpasses typical software or hardware upgrades. A true digital transformation is just as philosophical as it is physical. For education institutions, a digital transformation may look like creating a learning environment that connects in-person education resources to digital ones so that students can belong to a robust ecosystem that combines security, technology, and education services.

A digital transformation can help create a more personalized, collaborative, and interactive learning experience.

How to Digitally Transform Education

So, how exactly can the education sector undergo a digital transformation? Let’s look at a few paths education institutions can take to enhance their digital presence in a meaningful way.

  • Multimedia digital textbooks. Heavy textbooks will soon be a thing of the past, as students can now access source materials from their digital devices wherever they are whether that be at home, the library, or in the classroom.
  • Bring your own device (BYOD). Enabling students to use the digital device they work on best in the classroom to take notes and work on their assignments can help foster engagement and retainment.
  • Personalized curriculum. With artificial intelligence, it’s now possible to create customized learning experiences for students by using artificial intelligence.
  • Game-based learning. Not only does game-based learning help encourage students to study, but it can actually help them better retain the information they’re being taught. This is a concept known as gamification and it’s very commonly used in e-learning materials.

The Benefits of Digital Transformation on Education

Why would education systems invest ample time and money in a digital transformation? To start, doing so actually increases access to education from students because the education experience becomes less reliant on one specific geographical location. This accessibility just adds to the convenience associated with a digital transformation. From being able to access source materials from any device, to collaborating and sharing notes digitally, to more spaces for interaction between teachers, students, and peers with their instructors and fellow students, there are tons of valuable benefits of a digital transformation for students.

The Takeaway

Through a digital transformation, educators can help enhance students’ learning experiences by fostering better communication and connecting them to more educational resources and materials.

Digital transformation in education is bringing down geographical barriers, allowing learners worldwide to choose what they want to learn regardless of location. Localization can help expand the target audience of whatever educational program that is already online. In addition, students can benefit greatly from localization as learning in their native language can greatly boost their engagement with the education materials, how they understand it, and how they retain the information.

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What-Spanish-Language-Dialect-Do-I-Need-to-Translate-Into
17/01/2023

What Spanish Language Dialect Do I Need to Translate Into?

Posted on | by Jacqueline De Marco | Leave a Comment on What Spanish Language Dialect Do I Need to Translate Into?

When you think about translating your documents or content into different languages, it’s logical to think about Spanish as one of the first languages you’ll want to tackle. Spanish is the second most spoken Language after Chinese. Over 500 million people speak Spanish and these Spanish speakers are spread throughout 25 different countries across the globe. 

While at first glance it may seem like these 500 million people speak the same exact language, each of these countries (and sometimes smaller regions within them) speaks the Spanish language a little differently. They often share the same grammar structure, but can have major differences when it comes to vocabulary or pronunciation.

In order to determine which Spanish variant is the one that would best suit your audience, you should think beyond the language and focus on the target audience you want to address. 

Ask Yourself the Right Questions

It’s time to interview yourself on how well you know your audience. Before you choose a Spanish language variant to translate your content into, ask yourself the following questions to gain some much needed insight into which Spanish variant they speak. 

  • Where is my audience based? Once you determine where the base of your audience lives, it’s easier to identify the Spanish variants you need to use. If it’s a specific country, like the United States, then you need to translate into the US Spanish variant. There are as many variants as countries that speak Spanish, so it’s important to nail down the correct variant before you begin the process of translation.
  • Am I trying to target a broader audience? If you want to target people in Colombia, Perú and Chile, por example, LATAM Spanish may be more suitable as it’s a more neutral variant that everyone will understand. It’s all about identifying that unique audience you want to target.

If you’re still not sure who your audience is yet or where they live, take some time to do some research so you can narrow your focus. Between conducting market research and looking at your web analytics, you should be able to gather enough information about your target audience to determine where they live and what Spanish language variant they speak. 

How to Navigate the Different Spanish Variants

Despite the many different Spanish variants that exist, translating content for Spanish speakers does not have to be a daunting task. Here are some key pieces of advice to keep in mind when it comes time to translate your content into Spanish.

  • Be natural. Always aim to make your message sound natural to the people living in your target locale.
  • Keep things neutral. When you must reach a wide audience of Spanish speakers originating in different locales, a non-localized, neutral variant is the most practical choice.
  • Get nuanced. While it’s great to keep your language neutral when serving a wider audience, when targeting a highly specific audience, consider a localized message that includes regional nuance.
  • Find the right translation partners. Work closely with your translation company, and discuss your audience and intent. A good translation agency will help you pinpoint the right form of Spanish for your audience.

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Discover what The Challenges of Translating Gender Neutral Language are
30/08/2022

The Challenges of Translating Gender Neutral Language

Posted on | by Jacqueline De Marco | Leave a Comment on The Challenges of Translating Gender Neutral Language

A push for a shift to gender neutral language is garnering a lot of attention worldwide. While there is no universally agreed upon answer for how we should handle gender neutral language across a variety of cultures and languages, some individuals and even organizations are choosing to make the shift to not using gendered language choices. 

If you have a source text that has gender neutral language in it and it needs translating, what do you need to know about gender neutral language? Let’s investigate. 

What Gendered Language Is

Gendered language refers to language choices that assign a gender to a noun, verb, pronoun, or adjective. It’s especially common to see gendered language choices in both French and Spanish where nouns have gender inflections. Around the world there is a push happening to embrace gender neutral language. In order to achieve gender neutrality, most languages have to stray away from traditional grammar and linguistic standards and embrace new ones. While some people are more than ready to make this shift, others are fighting to hold onto more traditional language standards. 

Why Gender Neutral Language Matters in Translation

When working on a translation project, it’s important to understand what is happening in the source text in order to decide how it should be translated. If the original document is using gender neutral language, then there is an explicit intention of the author, writer, or company to be inclusive in their communications. Because of this, it would make sense for the translated text to take those gender neutral language choices into account and incorporate them in the translation to the target language to the extent possible.

To What Extent is Gender Neutrality in Translation Possible?

Because gender neutral language may not be as developed in that target language or even target country, it can be challenging to provide a clear and concise translated text that honors the desire of the original creator to use gender neutral language while making sure the newly translated text is easy to understand by the reader. 

Some languages are already genderless, in which case the translator won’t run into any problems. Some cultures are starting to use gender neutral alternatives so translating the text into one of those target languages may also present less roadblocks. 

In some cases, the translators may be able to use workaround word choices that are perfectly correct grammatically and that convey gender neutrality, but some others deviate from the traditional grammar structure. Regardless of whether it’s grammatical or ungrammatical, the use of gender neutral language may not be spread equally within the country or even within certain age groups. In some other cultures, gender neutral language is not even in the conversation.

Because of the various approaches currently being taken to adapt language (or in some cases not adapt it) to being gender neutral, the choice to translate your already gender neutral material is not as simple as it may seem. It’s super important to assess your target audience and consult with in-country linguists regarding the current climate surrounding this for that target audience and country, so you can be informed about what the best way to proceed is.

For those looking to adapt to gender-inclusive language when working with the English language, the United Nations has created helpful strategies that can be applied to any type of communication, including oral or written content, as well as formal or informal speech.

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21/06/2022

Does machine translation reinforce gender bias?

Posted on | by Jacqueline De Marco | Leave a Comment on Does machine translation reinforce gender bias?

Although a machine learning model can be a powerful tool in the translation space, it can only be as good as the data it learns from. If there is a systematic error in the data used to train a machine learning algorithm, the resulting model will reflect this. These errors are the main reason that gender bias is present in machine translation. Some aspects of this are out of the control of the machine translation engine creators, but some others aren’t. Let’s examine how machine translation reinforces gender bias and how it can be fixed.

How Errors Can Occur

Wikipedia serves as a good example of how machine translation errors can occur and reinforce gender bias. Wikipedia’s entries tend to be geographically diverse, lengthy, and refer to subjects in the third person, which leads to the use of a lot of pronouns. Because of this, Wikipedia entries (particularly biographies) often have potential to cause machine translation errors related to gender, especially if an article refers to a person explicitly early in a sentence, but not later on. 

How Errors Can Be Resolved

Let’s look at Google as an example of a company aiming to resolve machine translation mistakes regarding gender. Google acknowledges that its translation tools struggle with errors that lead to reinforcing gender bias. They believe that they need to advance translation techniques to surpass single sentences. Doing this requires setting new metrics for measuring their progress and creating datasets with the most commonly encountered context-related errors. They’re facing a significant challenge. Translation errors related to gender are susceptible, as they can incorrectly refer to someone and how they self-identify. 

Google is working towards long-term improvements on their machine learning systems so they can continuously improve how they translate pronouns and gender.

The Takeaway

In recent years there’s been more awareness that these biases exist and machine translation engineers are trying their best to resolve this issue quickly, but it’s no easy endeavor since gender works so differently in all languages. Even though many advancements have been made in the machine translation industry, work still needs to be done. In all reality, a human translator is much better equipped to handle such sensitive issues like gender. 

It has taken many years to improve machine translation quality, and additional improvements will take more time to make. However, this issue can’t wait that long to be addressed. Errors that reinforce gender bias are critical to work on now, considering the recent relevance gender inclusivity has taken recently. If a company wants to prioritize inclusive language, it’s not safe to use an automated solution. Gender is a sensitive topic; with a translation, you want to ensure your message is conveyed discreetly. Right now, human translators are researching and staying up to date with the latest trends in the languages they work with. This is necessary, as everything is changing so fast. Companies should turn to these professionals to ensure their brand is not hurt by a careless machine translation mistake.

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11/05/2022

3 Major Benefits of Inclusive Language for Your Business

Posted on | by Jacqueline De Marco | Leave a Comment on 3 Major Benefits of Inclusive Language for Your Business

Adopting inclusive language can help your business in more ways than one. There are both internal (amongst your employees) and external (amongst customers and clients) benefits that can truly impact your business that is worth keeping in mind. Let’s examine some of the main advantages of inclusive language for your business.

Better Workplace Environment and Employee Engagement

While it’s easy to focus on how your customers and clients would react to the use of inclusive language in your business, you should first look at how this switch will be received internally. 

Using gender inclusive language at work can be a strong step towards diminishing gender inequality both internally and externally. For example, using gender-neutral job titles in your job postings will make it easier for candidates of any gender to view themselves in the role. At the same time, you’ll be helping our society shift away from unconstructive gendered job titles. 

Inclusive language will help attract a diverse pool of job candidates, and will help retain them as well. Both millennials and Gen Z workers tend to seek out companies that prioritize fairness and equality in the workplace. Using inclusive language is a subtle switch you can make to show your employees that you actually adhere to the values your company stands for. 

Improved Customer Perception

Circling back to your customers and clients, you will find that using inclusive language can help you appeal to a more broad customer base and can help you make a good first impression when launching in new markets where gender inclusivity is a priority. Customers want to see that a brand is thinking about them and their needs. Using gender neutral language helps you relate better to those customers and makes them feel more included. 

Of course, your commitment here can’t end with just inclusive language. Your commitment to inclusion and diversity should also be apparent in your hiring practices, product development, and marketing campaigns. On both a public facing and internal front, you need to be practicing what you preach in every area of your business. Using inclusive language is a good method to help further a mission of inclusion, but not the only one. 

Enhanced Social Responsibility

As a business, you should aim to be an authoritative and responsible part of your community, no matter how big or small that community is. Inclusive language is something companies should take on as part of their social responsibility. This effort to be socially responsible may not have visible benefits right away, but it is an important part of running a business. Being socially responsible and living by your values will pay off in the end by helping attract a diverse workforce, making customers feel included, and making your business feel more approachable.

How to Incorporate Inclusive Language 

When it comes time to start incorporating inclusive language into your business, you’ll need to work with your localization provider about how to proceed. The movement for gender inclusive language is rapidly evolving and varies by location, so you need input from in-country specialists to adapt properly. The discussion surrounding inclusive language is not at the same stage in every country and it’s an emotional topic that will elicit different reactions from different customers and employees. It’s important to collaborate with a localization expert who can help you navigate these sensitive waters. 
Adding gender-inclusive language to your style guide is a great first step and these guidelines can provide your company with a road map toward inclusive language.

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29/03/2022

How Language Shapes Our Perception of Gender

Posted on | by Jacqueline De Marco | Leave a Comment on How Language Shapes Our Perception of Gender

Language can influence how we see the world in terms of gender and it is also one of the many ways a culture manifests. We know that some cultures are more conservative than others, some are more open-minded, some still have males as dominant figures, and others hold more antiquated views. Language can be a very powerful tool to change these realities and enable us to become a more inclusive society, where gender, race, age, etc. do not play a role in the treatment a person receives.

Let’s examine how language shapes our perception of gender and how this issue can be addressed. 

Why Gender-Neutral Terms Matter

For those who don’t spend much time thinking about how our language choices influence the world around us, the debate over gender-neutral language choices may not seem all that important. However, studies have shown that gendered language can have repercussions. A 2019 study found that using gender-neutral pronouns actually increases positive attitudes towards women and LGBTQ+ community. This happens by reducing the prominence of male identity, which can lead to less gender-based bias.

Language can direct or redirect our attention to certain aspects of reality. For example, someone who is a bilingual Spanish and English speaker, may find themselves less likely to use male and feminine distinctions when they speak English compared to when they speak Spanish. While it can be difficult to change an entire culture, introducing gender-neutral language options can have an impact on the people who employ or are exposed to them. For example, Japanese is another language that has gender influences. The Japanese language reinforces how men and women should speak, with women being expected to be more polite, indirect, and subtle. Many different languages have inverted gender for the same nouns or concepts, but not all languages have marked gender. English does not, which makes it easier to convert English language choices to gender neutrality. Introducing gender-neutral language choices in Japan could lead to less of those stereotypical gender reinforcements. 

Gender Prejudice in Language

Nouns across many different languages can be gendered. Whether or not a noun is considered female or male can alter how the speaker perceives that specific word and often impacts the adjectives they choose to describe that noun. Research has uncovered how people describe objects often correlates with the object’s given gender in a language. For example, in German, the word “bridge” has a feminine pronoun, so Germans are more likely to call bridges beautiful or elegant (traditionally feminine traits). In Spanish, the word “bridge” is masculine and is typically referred to as strong or sturdy. It’s easy to see how gendered language can, in a certain way, limit us or lead to certain prejudices.

Does Language Shape How We Think?

It appears that language does shape how we think. As we can see from the examples above, the gender association words have in different languages does have an impact in how we perceive reality. Once you acknowledge that, you can start making conscious decisions in word choices that are more gender neutral and inclusive. Little by little, languages can become more inclusive by means of their own speakers and effect change in the culture.

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08/03/2022

A Commitment to Women Beyond International Women’s Day

Posted on | by Jacqueline De Marco | Leave a Comment on A Commitment to Women Beyond International Women’s Day

The translation field, like many others, has historically been dominated by male participants. In the past, female translators weren’t always awarded the same opportunities as male translators or taken as seriously, despite the fact that they didn’t lack the talent or skills required to get the job done right. 

Even in time periods and locations where women weren’t encouraged (and often actively discouraged) to pursue formal education and careers, many women pushed forward and forged paths of their own in the translation space to become professional translators and interpreters.

We’re happy to report that today, the translation industry is now heavily dominated by female linguists. At Terra Translations, we are proud to be a part of the reason that many women are thriving in our industry. 

Terra has always been a company that values women. Since it first began, the CEO position was first held by Beatriz Cirera and later by her daughter, Marina Ilari. To date, Terra has 154 total team members, 112 of which are women. Currently, out of 17 leadership roles, 13 are held by women and many of Terra’s staff are involved with associations whose mission is to empower women.

In honor of International Women’s Day, we want to highlight some of our efforts to support women in the translation industry. 

How Terra Supports Women

Terra Translations is a certified women-owned business and we believe it’s our responsibility to lift other women in our industry up. As a part of this mission, Terra supports Chicas in Tecnología by providing pro bono translation services. Chicas in Tecnología is a non-profit organization in Argentina that works to reduce the gender gap in technology in that region by motivating and training the next generation of women leaders in technology.

Women in Localization is another nonprofit organization we love to support with a mission of fostering a global community for the advancement of women and the localization industry. Women in Localization accomplishes this mission by providing networking, education, career advancement, and mentoring opportunities to women in the localization industry. 

Another organization we like to support is Women in Games which aims to build a fair, equal and safe environment that empowers girls and women to join and thrive in the global gaming ecosystem.

Our CEO Marina Ilari is particularly passionate about supporting these types of organizations, including Enterprising Women Magazine, which is a national and global magazine for female entrepreneurs. As of 2020, Marina joined their Advisory Board. This Advisory Board is made up of professionals giving back to the women business owners’ community and as a board member Marina helps provide leadership and inspiration to female entrepreneurs worldwide.

At Terra, we don’t wait until International Women’s Day to celebrate women in our industry and beyond, we choose to celebrate them every day and hope you will join us!

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