3 Benefits of Hiring a Human Translator for Your Social Media Posts

While social media has helped businesses reach new categories of customers, it’s important to make sure this outreach into new markets is as effective and accurate as possible. In North Carolina, the Hispanic population is an estimated 932,221 people. With such a large, fast growing community, it’s important for NC businesses to make a considerable effort to market to this community. Ignoring the huge market of native-Spanish speakers in North Carolina (and in the United States) is a huge missed opportunity, especially in growing industries like construction.

Multi-lingual marketing is the best way to best reach this audience and can help expand your business.

Using Spanish Social Media Posts to Reach Spanish-speaking Customers

One of the easiest ways to reach this population is through social media — particularly using Facebook groups, hashtags, and a network of pages. But how can you reach the Hispanic market effectively if you don’t have a translator?

Some social media managers use online translation applications and websites, but these can lead to risky miscommunications and cultural insensitivities. Instead, here are three major benefits to getting a native Spanish-speaker to translate your social media posts.

1. Translators Understand the Local Community

If you are trying to reach the Hispanic population in your community, you are going to have to target your Spanish social media posts in a different way. For instance, there are Facebook groups for everything, from “Raleigh Jewish Moms” to “Raleigh Side Jobs” to “Raleigh Area Divers.” Chances are, local translators will have insight into social media groups and accounts that have a lot of leverage with the Hispanic community.

2. Translators Are Aware of Language Barriers

Computerized translation systems can only do so much. When things like Google Translate convert content from one language to another, they focus on repetition, patterns, and individual words, rather than the overall idea. This leads to misinterpretation and confusion between languages. That’s why it’s important to get human translators to translate content. Human translators understand how to translate using different dialects, slang, abbreviations, and general cultural differences between words and phrases.

If you plug in your English social media post into an automated translation tool or app, it won’t be able to pick up on things that a human translator would. Getting every word exactly right is especially important on social media because you only have so many characters to say what you want to say, so it needs to be as accurate as possible.

3. Hashtags Don’t Translate

While social media platforms have worked hard to integrate translation services into their systems, the ability to successfully translate content is limited through computer programming. Hashtags, which have become an essential part of posts in platforms like Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, cannot be automatically translated like the other content in these social media posts. Hashtags help connect people to topics they’re interested in, helping make social media what it is today. That’s why it’s imperative for companies to make sure their social media content is completely translated.

Say, for example, your soccer equipment company was watching the Olympics in Rio de Janeiro last summer and there was a game going on between Mexico and the United States. You would’ve wanted to create Tweets in English and in Spanish, so you could advertise your products to both audiences in their preferred language. People who were rooting for Mexico and typically Tweet in Spanish wouldn’t have been searching for #Brazil2016 as a first instinct, because they would look it up in the correct Spanish spelling, which is #Brasil2016. This is just one example of how automated translation tools miss the mark.

Looking to Reach Out to the Hispanic Community in Your Area?

Our translation specialists are here to meet your individual needs and help grow your business.

Call 919-995-2986 or request a quote online to discover local Spanish translation services and enhance your Hispanic marketing strategy today.