What is Spanish Translation?

With 570 million Spanish speakers, more than 470 million of whom are native speakers, Spanish is the second most widely spoken language in the world. But it is so widely spoken that different dialects are used in different regions. The context of words also varies according to culture. Therefore, as with any other language, researching the target language, culture and audience is essential for successful translation.

Let's say you own a chain of restaurants and you have restaurants in South America and Spain. You've created a promotional campaign for this restaurant chain and in the ad a customer calls a waiter. In the South American context, the word "mozo" should be used to address the waiter, but in Spain, the word for waiters is "camareo". You might think "what difference does it make which one I use if they both mean waiter in Spanish" or "why should I pay a ton of money for such minor details and get a Spanish translation service". Another example is, let's say your customer wants to order beans. For the target audience in Mexico, you need to use the word "frijoles", whereas in Chile people use the word "porotos" for beans. At this point, if you want to run a successful campaign, it's all about speaking the same language to reach the target audience.

You might even think, "Google Translate is so advanced now, I can use it to translate Spanish, so what". But translators don't just sit down and learn to speak Spanish during their four years of university studies. If you look at the catalog of any university's translation department, you'll see how much technical detail they study. For example, like most Romance languages, Spanish is a masculine and feminine language. But machine translation tools usually give you an output using masculine articles. In such a situation, if you are going to address women and you address them as men, you have already lost from the beginning.

Things to Consider When Translating Spanish

• Masculine and feminine articles
• Which dialect of Spanish will you use?
• In which region is the target audience?
• Cultural context

A small but life-saving note: No matter what language combination you get translation services in, make sure that proofreading and proofreading are part of the service. Translation, editing and proofreading are an inseparable trio for a successful and accurate output.