Promoting your products or services in any territory will require a significant marketing budget. But that considerable expense could still deliver disappointing results without the effective translation and localisation of your campaigns. There is no point funding the marketing of your messages if they will have little or no impact. At Word Connection, we can provide the effective and nuanced Japanese translation services you need to appeal to your target audience in Japan. Better still, our Japanese SEO service will ensure that your website receives the exposure it needs, courtesy of improved search engine rankings.
The unique challenges of marketing in Japan
With the marketing expenses that you face, it might be tempting to cut corners by using machine translation to create your content, marketing materials or videos. But this would be a false economy. Only a skilled, native Japanese translator and copywriter will possess the required understanding of the linguistic and cultural nuances that make all the difference. The enormous number of characters in Japanese presents a serious challenge when translating content. Written Japanese is comprised of three systems of characters; hiragana, katakana, and kanji. The first two of these are phonograms (sound symbols with no intrinsic meanings). Kanji are logograms (symbols with meanings and multiple readings). These were originally taken from Chinese. The three systems are used interchangeably and so it is incredibly easy to make mistakes when translating into Japanese.
The complexities of Japanese characters
Japanese School children learn hiragana and katakana before moving on to kanji. For this reason, marketing products to children requires a specific and tailored approach to Japanese language translation. On the other hand, businesses seeking to appear traditional or erudite will use mainly Kanji symbols. Particular care must be taken when using Katakana symbols. These are frequently utilised to express words which have been borrowed from other languages. Such words often have slightly different or very specific meanings in Japanese.
Machine translations can, therefore, generate words which are inappropriate or confusing to Japanese speakers. Further complications are caused by the increasing use of Latin characters in Japan. Sometimes it can pay to use Latin characters when translating marketing materials, particularly when targeting young people.
From website design to web content and from to social media marketing to blog posts, we will evolve the best approach and use the right characters to craft and promote your messages.
Japanese SEO strategies
There are many linguistic and cultural complexities that must be addressed when tackling Japanese translations. In addition, SEO strategies should be tailored specifically for Japanese searches. Google does not enjoy the dominance in Japan that it does in the western markets. Yahoo! remains an important search engine in Japan. Yahoo’s algorithm for ranking search results is not identical to that of Google. This necessitates a more detailed approach to optimising content. Internet marketing strategies must be multifaceted, particularly when targeting Japan.
We can ensure that you conquer Japanese search engines and gain improved visibility. To maximise the impact of SEO in Japan, your business would benefit from a .jp domain. We understand your business and its unique challenges. Due to that we offer our Translation Services for many different industries.
Japanese digital marketing tends to feature more information and less imagery than web pages in both Europe and America. We can assist you in obtaining a .jp domain and in designing a website that will appeal to your target audience. Japanese web design is a specialist skill. We can help you to develop a website that will rival those of businesses in Japan.
