Five Ways Translation Can Drive Up the Accuracy of Your Market Research

Market research is easily the most crucial step for expanding your business and making sure it is profitable, especially in a foreign market.

By using market research, you can tell what topics are trending overseas, how potential consumers would view your product and what sells on a day-to-day basis. But the language barrier can make it feel like these data sources are out of reach. Translation can help you acquire data from foreign markets or local demographics who speak other languages. Below, we’ll explore five ways translation can help you move into a new market in a data-driven and well-researched manner.      

1. Accurate Translation Can Help You Know More About Sales Data Sources  

One way to gain valuable insights into how and what people purchase in a foreign market is to look at sales data sources. These will tell you what is currently very popular in the market, which items and services sell a moderate amount (suggesting room for expansion), and which types of services and products just don’t seem to have any sales potential.  All of these are key in expanding your business.

It’s common to look at direct sales data like point of sale (POS) transactions within retail settings or even data from what is purchased using different credit cards. If you’re seeking such reports in foreign countries, you may well need help making sense of them in the new language(s). That’s where translation can come in handy: it can help translate sales data reports so that you make use of them in your native tongue to contribute to your market research.  

2. Smart Translation Can Enable You to Conduct Consumer Surveys 

Another fundamental way companies look into expanding into new markets is to conduct consumer surveys. However, if you’re looking to develop into a foreign-speaking market, there is a language barrier to contend with. You would need to translate the surveys themselves and the answers. You might even need to work with people who can speak a foreign language to administer the surveys and deal with any queries that arise during the process. 

That is what a translation services provider, Tomedes, is doing for its clients. The company helps to break down the language barriers faced by its clients. According to Ofer Tirosh, CEO of Tomedes, translation services can help keep the core tone and message intact in the new language. This can mean people speak in slang, common idioms, or local references. This is especially important for consumer surveys, which consumers may submit in more casual language than they might use on more formal documentation. 

What translation services can do is help make sense of these often difficult-to-understand uses and convert those elements of language so that you can get the best and most accurate insights from your surveys. Translation services can especially help in an era of world surveys, enabling you to embrace global market research like never before. Professional translation services can do those and so much more.

3. Effective Translation Helps to Understand Trending Topics on Social Media  

Another way to get insights into a new market when expanding your business is to find out what people are talking about on social media, such as this social media data mining project. Most social media analysis looks at whether people are mentioning your type of product at all and how favourably they might be talking about it. The absolute best-case scenario is that many people are mentioning they would like to buy the product or service you offer, but they can’t find many local distributors.

For example, a clothing retailer might look at what people are talking about in their target foreign market on social media. People might be mentioning a certain style that is popular in the area, and the clothing retailer could then jump on offering that type of clothing.  

Where translation can help is making sure the original messages from the foreign social media sites are well-translated. Many social media sites have built-in translation programs, but often those can only go so far and aren’t always appropriate for use in a professional setting. 

In 2018, Facebook announced it was using multilingual word embedding to help raise the speed and accuracy of its automated translation. It boasted 95% accuracy with its new system. However, Facebook mentioned they are still working on idioms and cultural nuances – something that people use a lot on social media. Then there’s the fact that the remaining 5% inaccuracy could skew any data you are working with. 

Social media is a highly casual platform where people use a very loose grammar style, and slang, meta-references, and idioms are often more common. A human eye can help translate this type of language more intuitively.           

4. Suitable Translation Takes a Deep Dive Into Focus Groups

Focus groups provide an outstanding opportunity to take a deep dive into a different country’s context, but they can be daunting to carry out when you don’t speak the same language as those you need to consult. Don’t be put off, though. Preparing for a focus group, regardless of the language it’s carried out, means taking a structured approach to the topics you’re going to ask about and ensuring you connect with the right demographics.  

All of your planning can be done in your native language, so you can prepare to carry out your focus groups in the usual way. It’s simply a matter of bringing in language professionals to translate your materials and to carry out any one-to-one discussions. 

5. The Best Translation Can Unleash the Full Power of IoT  

Another interesting place where data comes from is the internet of things (IoT). IoT data sources pull information from real-world operations and movement. It might pull data from machine sensors, wearables like heart rate monitors, a variety of business apps, or location data from mobile devices, as a few examples. As it relates to market research, a large amount of data could be coming in from apps monitoring sales data mentioned above, like POS data. 

If this data comes from a foreign market, you might want to get help translating the data reports to ensure the accuracy of your understanding of them. Translation services can help you lay out the data in formats and reports that are easy to share and understand during meetings with your colleagues. You can also translate those reports into various languages if you have offices in different regions. Further, IoT data comes in massive, constantly updating volumes, so the reports must be handled by those who appreciate the specialist processes involved in managing it. 

These are just some of the ways that professional translation services can help the accuracy of your market research. These are particular benefits that you cannot derive anywhere else. If you want to be sure that your market research is in the right direction when you’re expanding your business, get help from professional translation services.