Young woman working on laptop Translation

Why You Should Translate Your Corporate Training Into Different Languages

Why translate your corporate training? 

The short answer: Translating your training content into multiple languages is the ideal way to communicate with your students to maximize their comprehension and makes the learning process more accessible and effective for everyone. 

Every company administers some form of corporate training to its employees, and the size of a company’s corporate training will vary depending on the size of the company.

Especially if you are a company that is spread out across multiple regions or countries, with staff who hail from different parts of the world or who deal professionally with a variety of regions, then simply offering corporate training in only one language will not cut it.

Failing to address your workers in the language(s) that they naturally use to communicate can result in slower training completion times, substandard labor relations, and even workplace accidents and injuries. 

Attention to the specific and diverse needs of your staff and clientele will propel your business forward in its mission to make it on the global stage. 

This blog explores the importance of thoughtfully overcoming cultural barriers and why it’s important to hire translators who can localize your corporate training. 

The 5 Benefits of Offering Multilingual Corporate Training

There are a number of benefits that come with offering corporate training in the languages that are most suitable to your employees and the other parties you do business with.

Reduced Training Costs 

If you’re only delivering your corporate training in English while many of your employees are non-native English speakers, then you’re going to need to present the training at a more moderate pace in order to ensure comprehension, not to mention repeating the training if the message wasn’t fully received the first time around.

The longer it takes your learners to implement what they’ve learned, the more the training will cost you. By translating the training to a language that is easier for the recipient to understand, your training costs will be lower. 

Safer Training 

Providing versions of your corporate training in multiple languages has been shown to reduce the amount of workplace accidents, injuries, and fatalities. OSHA, the Occupational Safety and Health Administration, “estimates that language barriers are a contributing factor in 25 percent of job-related accidents,” proving why allowing a learner to receive corporate training in the language they best understand is highly critical when it comes to workplace safety. 

Higher Productivity 

The Training Industry reports that administering training in a learner’s native language resulted in a “significant increase in productivity and product quality.” When your corporate training courses are effectively translated, the learner is able to be primarily “focused on the subject matter, not on trying to interpret the material.” Your employees will be more productive when misinterpretation isn’t a part of the equation. 

Improved Workplace Relationships

Relationships in the workplace are proven to be better when language differences are accommodated and everyone is provided with the tools they need to do their job as best they can. For example, New York-based Wenner Bread Products decided to introduce a new strategy to tackle cultural barriers between English and Spanish speakers in their workplace. By making orientation training for all new hires available in both English and Spanish, the company observed not only a substantial decrease in injuries and illnesses, but improved labor relations with its Spanish-speaking workers as well.

Expanding Into Global Markets

Whether you already have an established relationship or you’re looking to expand into markets located in different regions across the globe, having your corporate training available in the appropriate languages is the ideal approach. 

“Having staff members who speak key languages improves a business’ ability to negotiate effectively in international contexts and opens up new opportunities,” FluentU explains. By building global relationships and not limiting your company to a contained market merely based on language, you’re investing in your company’s success. 

This will also enable you to simship, which is shorthand for “simultaneous shipment.” Simshipping involves distributing content to all your target markets in the appropriate languages at the same time, instead of rolling out your content in staggered intervals.

Considerations as You Translate Your Corporate Training 

When you translate your corporate training into different languages, you don’t need us to inform you that it’s not simply a matter of copying and pasting your materials into Google Translate. Here are a few factors to keep in mind as you develop your translated corporate training content:

Localize Your Content

By localizing your training content as opposed to merely translating it, you’ll be paying heed to the contextual nuances of a language. Localizing your content ensures that context and the entire spirit of a message is considered during the translation process to best address a particular market in the way they naturally communicate. Read up on the differences between translation and localization in the context of a global ad campaign.

Hypothetically, if your brand message or slogan isn’t carefully localized, your words can end up having the exact opposite effect than the one that you’re intending. In some cases, brands whose campaigns have been mistranslated in certain markets have been forced to launch multimillion-dollar rebranding campaigns in order to amend their accidental mistranslations.Hiring a localization expert from the particular population that you’re aiming to target with your training is a great way to localize your content efficiently.

Test Your Training on Different Devices

When text is translated from one language to another, it’s likely that its length will change. If your training is being administered through an online module or a mobile application, you’ll want to ensure that the updated text lengths don’t ’break’ your training interface, so to speak. You don’t want your content to be engulfed by white space, and on the other hand, you don’t want it to be too expansive that it doesn’t all fit on the screen. 

Make Content Generic

As you’re authoring your training content, you certainly want to take lengths to ensure that it is dynamic and engaging and that your recipients see themselves and their work reflected in the training, but you want to achieve this without being overly specific. Being too specific will make it harder to translate into different languages. Try to minimize references to cultural humor and situations that only specific audiences who are located in a specific region or share the same cultural associations will understand. It’s primarily the job of a localization expert to ensure that the content resonates with a specific region.

Hiring a Voice Actor to Perform Your Translated Training

When you need to hire a voice actor to read the script for your corporate training, you’re bound to find one on Voices. With Voices, you can narrow your search to find the voice actor who is specifically suited to your needs based on language, accent, and category of work, such as business or educational. Voices allows you to manage all of your voice acting jobs on the same site, so you can hire voice actors based all around the world who authentically speak a number of different languages without needing to toggle between different platforms or do specific casting. 

Sign up for a Voices account to find voice actors in different languages to deliver your corporate training. 

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