Well, we tried a search on both Cuil and Google with the same four-word search phrase:

“japanese translation company tokyo“

Results?

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Click “Favorite.”

Arigatou!!

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1. English-to-Japanese translation for persuasion: Words to the wise (and words of warning!)
   http://japanese-web.com/?p=23&akst_action=share-this
2. Dealing with special sensitivities – a real-world international copywriting case study
   http://japanese-web.com/?p=26&akst_action=share-this
3. Adaptation agencies cf. plain old translation agencies: All about “Advertising sans frontieres”
   http://japanese-web.com/?p=28&akst_action=share-this
4. Selecting translation companies for copywriting: Seven tips for evaluating and choosing the right agency
   http://japanese-web.com/?p=31&akst_action=share-this
5. Six steps for preparing a nuanced marketing campaign for a local translation… and getting great results
   http://japanese-web.com/?p=34&akst_action=share-this

Del.icio.us users: Thank you!
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http://del.icio.us/webobserver/japanese
http://del.icio.us/kathleen_fasanella/marketing
http://del.icio.us/webmarketingideas

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Japanese translation in blog posts

Thought we’d have a look at bloggers’ articles related to Japanese translation. The interests covered in the links below are varied, to say the least, and it’s extremely unlikely, dear reader, that every one of these links will interest you.

http://blogs.mediapost.com/mobile_insider/?p=187
This is not actually about translation. It’s an article about mobile media and marketing in Japan compared with the U.S.

http://blog.librarysupportstaff.org/?p=557
Rick viewed a page of his blog in Japanese through Google Translate and wondered if the humor had been lost in (machine) translation. Actually, the translation itself was laughable. But, hey, that’s what you get with automated translation.

http://samuraicoder.net/textmate_manual_japanese_translation_now
I guess that Taka’aki Kato has just completed translating the user manual (or developers’ manual?) for the software application TextMate. He’s also into Ruby on Rails. Cool!

http://www.punkednoodle.com/champloo/index.php/2008/06/02/translation-woes/
Otaku Champloo investigates why some manga are translated into English and others aren’t.

http://www.subdemon.com/forum/index.php?topic=20402.0
A fan of Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra wants to have some of their Japanese lyrics translated accurately into English…”preferably free.” Apparently he/she also doesn’t care to pay Tokyo Ska Paradise Orchestra or their label for the music itself, either. Another member of this forum responds, correctly: “The only thing that can translate japanese to english accurately is a living human.”

http://pinklizzysews.blogspot.com/2008/05/japanese-translation.html
PinkLizzy translated a sewing pattern for a girl’s dress from Japanese.

http://keep0ngoing01.blogspot.com/2008/05/japanese-translation_19.html
We don’t exactly know why someone would want to do this, but the blogger here has (randomly?) associated Japanese syllables with the 26 letters of the English alphabet for the purpose of creating “Japanese” names from English names. Hmmmm…

http://www.flickr.com/help/forum/en-us/72173/
A Flickr user wants to know when Flickr will have a Japanese interface. Offers many reasons why it would be sensible.

http://www.dianadabinett.com/autos/free-of-charge-japanese-translation-service/
Blogger dianadabinett, whose blog seems to lack any specific theme or purpose, promotes here a “Free-of Charge Japanese Translation Service” offered by one of our competitors, Kiko-Net. The service that Kiko-Net offers is pretty clever: Very limited free human translation of a single web page, free as long as you agree to put a Kiko-Net banner on the page. Nice idea. This blogger filed this post in the category “Autos.” Eh?

http://www.squidoo.com/japanesetranslation
brettkun blogs about Arts & Literature, Japanese translation practice, grammar, English, Japan, and so on.

Our own blog
Here are our own posts relevant to Japanese translation:
http://japanese-web.com/category/japanese-translation/

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International copywriting (all articles)

Follow 6 key steps. Avoid pitfalls.
A prerequisite for all of our tips below is to find a local copywriting supplier with marketing savvy, lots of experience and a work style compatible with your team’s. And, truth be told, though one of us works at a leading Japanese translation agency, we know that not all companies and projects are a good fit. Carefully choose a vendor who works the way you need them to work.

For the sake of today’s article, let’s assume you’ve already found the right agency. When you’ve selected a vendor and you’re about to order the full process, from translation through independent proofreading through a final copy rewrite, here are six preparation steps that will take you a long way toward a satisfactory result.

1. Prepare a copywriting brief. The purpose is to give the vendor some background and explain the persuasive intent of the copy. There’s no special format necessary when writing a brief. You could put it all in an email if you prefer. Just be sure to explain the target market/audience, the context of the campaign, the company’s branding strategy, and any visuals that go along with the copy. Most importantly, explain what the current copy is meant to say to the reader, the impact and/or effect it’s supposed to have.

2. Save and share background materials. Always keep your original source files for layouts in whatever program (InDesign, Illustrator, Flash, etc.) with editable text layers (if you’re not familiar with that term, just pass it on to your graphic designer!). In fact, always keep everything related to the original campaign development or translation process. Better to have it and not need it than vice versa.

3. Make sure that your agency contact understands you’re ordering more than just translation. In the conventional workflow of volume-driven translation agencies, we know from experience that normal text is handled by a translator and independent proofreader, neither of whom is expected to go beyond carrying the meaning of the text. When we say “normal text” we mean straightforward documents that merely explain, describe or inform. (Think: user guides, city signage, product instructions, engineering specs, academic papers, and so on.) If your text is straightforward, a translator and proofreader can take care of the whole job. In that case, you don’t even have to be reading about copywriting.

But, if your original persuasive copy is for marketing material, a snappy ad or tagline, which requires cultural savvy or a native play on words, then that’s another story. You need to make this very clear to any potential firm and make sure they have the expertise to handle the project. It’s a much different kind of project. In this case, the copywriter will work with the project manager to understand the goals of the project and will need to rewrite the text to be persuasive in the new language and culture. Make sure any potential vendor knows that.

4. Encourage the local copywriter to be creative. This may seem like odd advice, but your encouragement can make a huge difference in the persuasiveness of the final copy. Unlike copywriters at advertising agencies, you may find that translation agency copywriters hold back their creativity. This is natural. Translation is by its nature a conservative art. If you want bold ideas, be sure to encourage boldness throughout the process. Try it. You’ll see what we mean.

The Japanese copywriter, for example, understands how to adapt your original copy to convert Japanese readers into buyers or brand loyalists but needs to be “licensed to kill” with creativity. The agency coordinator or project manager will select the writer with the most appropriate industry knowledge and background. A good project manager will ask for multiple iterations and form internal focus groups to ensure the highest quality results. The desired result is copy that persuades. Remember, people from any culture – Japanese, Western or other — can consciously or subconsciously sense when copy is truly speaking their language and when it’s just a bland, safe, “faithful” translation of some foreign copy. Wording really counts. Tell your agency NOT to play it safe. Get unique copy in each language.

5. Find fussy final reviewers at the client’s local office, but make sure they understand the goal. If possible, the final client-side reviewers should be at a local office in the new target market. For example, if the end-client has a Tokyo office they’ll probably want the local staff there to review the Japanese copy. If you find that the native reviewers fuss over details, don’t worry – but do listen. It means they’re paying attention. This is a good thing, because then you can discuss their feedback with the copywriter to decide whether or not to make edits. But beware: The local office staff are also trained to play it safe. If they feel that the unique copy is a “bad translation” of the original campaign, make sure they understand that it’s not the meaning but rather the persuasive effect of the copy that needs to be equivalent with the source campaign.

6. Don’t forget to request font selection and layout. The translation company team should be able to present you with a selection of appropriate font samples, ranked according to their recommendations. Fonts matter, and are often overlooked in requests for proposals. Bring it up when you’re negotiating the order. Make sure that it’s included. Also, most translation companies offer layout and graphic design services. This can add a lot to the budget — but for very special copy such as the large text in ads, it’s usually necessary to have native layout engineers choose font spacing and line breaks.

Those are just some basics and we’re sure there’s a lot more to add here. Comments? What else has helped you or your clients prepare for projects? We especially welcome input from other professionals from inside our industry. If you’re a copywriter or a translation agency professional, are there other tips you’d like to share? Ways to keep a project progressing smoothly? If you’re new to all of this, what other questions do you still have about preparing for your translation project?

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About the authors

• Lawrence LaFerla is the division head for JAPANtranslation and blogger in chief at “Marketing on the Japanese web.” He works in sunny Osaka.
• Hannah Smalltree is the senior editor of SearchDataManagement.com, an online technology publication, and freelance copywriter, based in Massachusetts.

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Can we help you?

Japanese for free…
If you’re just looking for a Japanese word or phrase, you can try your luck with machine translation, here.

Better quality, for a fee. (Not free.)
If you’re looking for professional Japanese translation services, this is where you’ll want to start.

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International copywriting (all articles)

International copywriting:
7 Tips.
If you’re new to this blog or to the exciting world of translation services companies, you might want to start here to find out why “persuasive copy translation” services are such a big deal. By persuasive copy, we mean materials meant to persuade – such as sales, advertising and marketing materials or press releases. This ballgame differs significantly from translating straightforward text, such as user manuals.

For persuasive copy, picking the right vendor for you and your project is critical. Though we work for a firm, which offers English-to-Japanese copywriting services, we intend these tips to be unbiased, honest recommendations gained from our own experience. These seven tips will help anyone assess any translation services firm, so you can choose the best fit for you. Like tips? Check out this post on how to prepare for a translation project, once you’ve picked the right vendor.

1. Choose an agency, not a freelancer. There are thousands of brilliant freelancers in our business, but only an agency has the resources to handle the entire process of adapting marketing campaigns. We admit that this is a controversial statement. There are many freelance translators who genuinely believe that if they work together with the end-client’s local office they can produce ad-agency-quality marketing copy in the local language. The truth is that a freelancer and the client’s local office in the target country both have an interest in playing it safe. Yes, yes, of course they’re savvy enough to avoid literal translations but they’ll remain too “faithful” to the original campaign’s meaning.

When the client reviewer receives translated copy, he or she expects a specific meaning to be conveyed. Contrast this with the review process for transcreated copy. In the case of adapted copy, the actual meaning of the text could be practically anything. It doesn’t particularly matter what the copy says. What matters is what the copy does.

(We’re probably going to get angry mail about this from translation professionals. To understand the controversy in more detail, have a look at this discussion. Of course our industry wouldn’t even exist without professional translators. But the point here is that organized teamwork is required to create killer copy in local languages.)

If you want bold, creative copy, it takes a bigger team. You need to connect first of all with a main contact at the agency who speaks your own language fluently. That agency has to be able to assign to the project an entire team, who should be native to the target language and culture: you’ll want a native project manager, a native translator, a native proofreader, a native copywriter and an internal focus group to review the copy. No lone individual, no matter how dynamic, can manage all this on his or her own. Find the right agency.

2. Select a multi-service agency. Find a translation firm that offers not only translation and independent proofreading but also native copywriting in your target language(s). Find an agency that shows you a willingness to take the time to read your marketing brief, listen and ask clarifying questions, and build an ongoing service relationship with your team.

3. Pick an agency with someone who speaks your language – literally. If English is your native language, make sure that you connect with a translation company project manager (agency rep) who understands your language. Every step of your interaction with a translation company – negotiating your order, providing the brief, explaining the business context of the copy – requires close communication. Your agency rep needs to understand the nuances of the original copy and exactly what you want. He or she will need to have a sort of “mind meld” with you before he or she briefs the translator(s), proofreader(s) and the target language copywriter(s). So, if the rep is a native English speaker, that’s a big plus for you.

4. Choose an agency where you can get the same team for every job. Ask the agency rep if you’ll be able to rely on the same team for each job. Sometimes timing or special circumstances will require you to accept different teams at any given time. But if quality and consistency are important to you, it’s better to stick with the same team even if scheduling has to be delayed now and then.

5. Know your history and your goals – the more specific, the better. Be prepared to explain the sales or branding objectives of the campaign. Brief the translation agency rep on the creative processes that led to the current copy. What feeling or reaction is the reader supposed to have? What attitude does the campaign want to impart? What’s the broader context of the target market?

6. Make sure that details don’t get lost somewhere along the marketing campaign’s supply chain. If there’s a string of agencies outsourcing to other agencies on the project, be sure that a copy of the creative brief will be shared with all involved. For example, if the process starts at the end-client office, proceeds to an advertising agency, then back to the end-client, then to a home country translation agency and then to a target-language country agency, be sure that the brief gets passed along and that the most potent ideas in the campaign aren’t watered down or changed with each retelling. (Remember the childhood “telephone” game? Funny when you were five years old, not so with a five-digit project budget. Learn more about creative briefs here.)

7. Be wary of promised “perfection.” If you contact a copywriting team that claims to be infallible, run away! The best professionals will offer multiple iterations of the same copy. They’ll go out on a limb, try different ideas and brainstorm. They’ll have internal focus groups review copy and may change things as they learn more or get new insight into the project. Taking chances, being creative and sometimes failing, is all part of the process. Embrace it – your campaign will be better for it. Promise.

Your turn. What else should people consider when choosing a translation services agency? What did or will you look for in a translation service company? Scroll down and post a comment!

We welcome your involvement!

• Found this post useful? Join our mailing list! Your email address is safe with us. We send out mailings on the first of every month just to remind you what’s new on the blog.
• Feel free to post your relevant comment about this article in the “LEAVE A COMMENT” box, below.
• Contribute an article to this blog.
• Or, just click the “Share This” button (below) to bookmark or email this post to your network.

About the authors

• Lawrence LaFerla is the division head for JAPANtranslation and blogger in chief at “Marketing on the Japanese web.” He works in sunny Osaka.
• Hannah Smalltree is the senior editor of SearchDataManagement.com, an online technology publication, and freelance copywriter, based in Massachusetts.

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Of course you may want to have a look at our own recent posts relevant to the translation industry. Then, below, find posts of interest on other blogs…

Importance Of Reputation In The Translations Industry

Reaching Your Spanish-Speaking Audience with Global Translations

An interesting new translation blog

Translation Matters - Helpful Tips for Translation Service Buyers

What Are Freelance Translators Good For?

SDL buys Idiom and begs the question: Will it exit the translation services game?

Translation management

A New Look at an Old Question by an Ancient Project Manager

Three Myths About The Translation Business

Importance of Business Translation

The Word Wide Web

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WordPress SEO Central

A WordPress SEO philosophy
by Bradley Spencer

The editors of this blog were so enthusiastic about the search engine optimization (SEO) work I did for “Marketing on the Japanese web” that they’ve asked me to write about it here. Over the last couple of years, I’ve developed my own set of changes to a standard WordPress blog that get it higher in search rankings, and therefore, viewed by more people. Even though I’ve SEO’d many blogs, it’s always exciting to see how “Google and the Gang” (my term for Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and others) can really give better rankings after a few simple tweaks. It’s like magic! But it isn’t magic. It’s just a few surprisingly easy techniques.

First, despite popular belief, WordPress isn’t optimized for search engines right “out-of-the-box.” WordPress is a great blogging platform, a good Content Management System (CMS), and one of the best tools in the SEO’ers or web developer’s toolbox. Plus, it’s free. But, it just doesn’t do SEO that well without some customizations.

Now here’s the good news: WordPress can be easily modified so your blog absolutely dominates your niche, that is — assuming your content is authoritative and relevant to your niche. (If not, maybe you should find another niche.) By making a few quick changes, adding a few plugins and cutting away some of the extra crap — you can reach the people searching for the information you offer. Better yet, you can often end up on Google’s first page, the Holy Grail of search engine placement.

Although I won’t go over the entire step-by-step process required to make all of the changes to WordPress you’ll really want to make (you can find that in WordPress SEO Blueprint), here are some basics to help you develop your blog template.

WordPress Search Engine Optimization: Six tips for success

Know your niche and target key words:
You’ve probably learned in life that you can’t be everything to everyone — and this goes for the Web as well. Before you develop your content, make sure that you understand your niche and understand what words people will search on to find you.

There are some free tools that can help you, such as Keyword Discovery, NicheBot Classic and WordTracker. These free tools analyze a small sample of search data, but even that small sample can show you the exact words people type into search engines. Just type in what you think people might search on and take note of the number that appears by the phrase. Now try some synonyms and alternate phrasings. Again, the free tools analyze a small sample set of search data, so don’t assume that low numbers by your key phrase mean no one is searching on your phrase. Instead look at where different phrases rank relative to each other. Factor in the words used by your competitors or partners. Then, narrow down the right phrase(s) to focus on in the SEO process. Avoid the urge to squash many terms into one place. Focus on just one or a select few — and you (and your readers) will be happier with the results.

Build your content:
The best way to use WordPress, both for usability and for search engine rankings, is to approach it just like other web projects. Build “pages” for your main content. Then regularly add “posts” to support your main content. You never want to put really important content only in your blog, because blogs, by definition, are an ever-changing landscape and great content will quickly disappear as you post new great content. Put the important stuff on a permanent page.

For an example of this, look at my SEO and Web design site at BradleySpencer.com. You’ll see that all of the most important pages are linked to from the sidebar, and if you read the posts, many of them will link to the more important pages within my domain. That’s the way you want to slowly build content, links, and link popularity.

Hacking your themes:
Make sure the search engines know exactly what your page is about. To do this, you’ve got to focus your site around your relevant search terms and make sure your “Title tags” and “Heading tags” are correct. This is going to involve some hacking of the template (in WordPress, templates are called “themes”.)

Warning: If you’re hacking your theme, you’re going to need to know some HTML and PHP. If you’re bright and have a lot of time and interest in this sort of thing, you can jump right in and play around and figure your way around HTML and PHP in a couple of weeks or months. For the remaining 97% of WordPress users, you’ll want to find someone who can do this for you.

Clean out links that aren’t crucial:
Ideally, links should go to your own site OR to high-quality content on another relevant site. Other links aren’t always helpful and could be hurtful. For example, “Blogrolls” are horrible for SEO purposes. I never use them. If you have to link to outside sites that aren’t really in your niche, put them on a separate page, not in a widget column. See how this blog has tucked outside links away on this page: About Marketing on the Japanese web.

The best way to clean up your links is to understand all of the links on your site — and to clean out the outdated, irrelevant and dead links. To do this, go to http://www.dead-links.com/ and run a search on your site. Dead Links is designed to ensure that all of your links are still good, but for our purposes, we just want to look at the list of links they find.

Once you get that list from Dead Links, go over it with a fine-toothed comb and make sure every single link is important and relevant. Naturally, give special attention to links that are actually in your articles – don’t delete things that are relevant just because they go to someone else’s site. Careful outside linking is actually good for SEO. But any link that comes up again and again on many pages, such as with a blogroll widget built into the theme, is a big no-no.

Now that you have compiled a list of unwanted links, you’ll have to go through your site, find them, locate any buried in your theme and delete ‘em.

Avoiding Duplicate Content:
Search engines don’t want to see the same article in many different places — then it looks like syndicated, not-unique content — and the search engines give higher rankings to unique, relevant content. The problem with WordPress is that it’s easy to end up with the same article on a bunch of different pages. You might have it showing on the homepage, on its own single page, in the archives, on a tag page, and on and on. See the problem?

Avoiding duplicate content may push you to look really closely at your particular blog and its goals — and to think differently about how you promote your content. You may need to make tough decisions that go against your marketing instincts to constantly promote your great content everywhere you can. Just trust that with proper SEO’ing, people will find your great content, even if you don’t put it in their face many times. My suggestion for the general WordPress population is always to use the “read more” tag when you write a post. This means that only a few sentences of your post will display on your homepage. This will force the spider to go into the deeper pages to scoop up all the good content, and that’s what you want. This is called “deep indexing.”

Pinging the Right Places:
Google also cares about who you know — and who knows you. If many people are linking to your content, it indicates that it’s relevant and helpful to many people and Google will rank it higher. But you shouldn’t wait for people to find you and link to you. “Pinging” is the automated process of telling any website that receives blog feeds that you wrote something new and you want them to know about it. In the case of the search engines, pinging tells them to crawl and index what you just wrote, so it will show up in Web searches.

You’ll want to ping a lot of places so that your content gets indexed and distributed to more sites and people. The best way to do this is to update your pinging services within WordPress. All you have to do is replace the default list with the list you find here:
http://elliottback.com/wp/archives/2004/11/21/a-list-of-rpc-and-rpc2-to-ping/
[Ed. note: 2004?? Is this outdated information? If so, the reader is advised to find similar, more recent lists]

Conclusion:
These are some of the most important WordPress search engine optimization tactics that you can use to help Google and the Gang know what your blog is all about. Want to know more? As I mentioned, I’ve written a step-by-step guide to installing plugins and how to optimize your blog. Check out my ebook here — it’s called the WordPress SEO Blueprint.

May each and every one of you enjoy the blogging ride and may the major search engines smile on your most authoritative, relevant writing.

All the Best, Brad

:: :: :: :: :: :: :: :: ::

Further reading on WordPress SEO

WordPress.com Subdomain Spam With Tags?

Excellent WordPress SEO Tips

Maximum SEO with Wordpress h1 header tags

Wordpress SEO and Google Adsense

Easy SEO for start up Blogers

Some Wordpress SEO Thoughts

Bloggers on WP - Upgrade to the new version Wordpress 2.5.1

Managing Web Content With SEO Copy Writing!

5 Must Have SEO Plugins for WordPress

Professional WordPress and SEO service

SEO for WordPress Blogs White Paper

Wordpress Seo Düzenlenir

Life is Too Short for SEO Optimization

Top Ten WordPress SEO Tips

WordPress 2.5: Changing Saved Page Slugs

WordPress SEO and Blog Marketing

WordPress SEO

Ultimate WordPress SEO Tips
We welcome your involvement!

• Found this post useful? Join our mailing list! Your email address is safe with us. We send out mailings on the first of every month just to remind you what’s new on the blog.
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• Or, just click the “Share This” button (below) to bookmark or email this post to your network.

About the author

• Bradley Spencer is an internet marketing consultant in Columbus, Ohio and author of WordPress SEO Blueprint. He’s also knowledgeable about recreational vehicles, the enneagram, and who knows what else.

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Burton · Münch & Partner World Wide Writers

What’s advertising sans frontieres?
We wish we had been the ones to coin that phrase, but it most likely was first used by Mike Münch of Germany’s top adaptation agency, Burton · Münch & Partner World Wide Writers (BMPwriters), specialists in creative translation copywriting that goes the extra mile.

An adaptation agency is like a translation agency cross-bred with an ad agency + branding consultancy + copywriting firm. Think high end, high quality service (and really nice offices). BMPwriters’ clients are advertising and PR agencies that need BMPwriters’ help to give clients “a compelling voice internationally.” If you have a multilingual ad campaign that has to be rendered pitch-perfect and culturally savvy in different international markets, and you have the budget to invest in top quality service, consider going with an adaptation agency. They’ll guide you smoothly through the entire process.

Adaptation agencies are designed to offer full-on consulting. They’re prepared to take their time working with clients in a more intimate way than you’ll find at ordinary, volume-oriented translation agencies, explains Mike, a friend of ours and co-founder of BMPwriters. Working with advertising, public and investor relations agencies as well as marketers going global, BMPwriters has built up substantial adaptive copywriting and consulting expertise.

“Adaptation agencies close the gap between translation and copywriting,” considered Mike during a recent phone conversation…

It’s all about readjusting and fine-tuning the original message so it can perfectly home in on the target group, which is always a critical balancing act. On the one hand, the adaptation must reflect the marketer’s agreed tone of voice, corporate wording, etc.; on the other, it has to satisfy the target market’s linguistic, cultural and psychological requirements to come across as powerful, hard-hitting copy. We also look into differences in the competitive situation on the home vs. the target market and take other critical factors into account. The adjustment may range from finding or creating a play on words that works and adds currency to the marketer’s message, to rewriting text that is perceived as tongue-in-cheek in the original message but might strike the wrong chord or be politically incorrect outside the home market. In other words, it’s a results-driven approach for high-impact messages in advertising, public and investor relations as well as executive communications.

By contrast, most translation services companies are set up to take the usual translation orders for the vast majority of documents that merely describe, inform or explain things. Experience trains conventional translators to take a conservative/prosaic approach to text. They normally aren’t given to taking a bold/poetic approach. Most can, but won’t get creative unless the project manager specifically asks for it. Nothing wrong with that. And this is not to disrespect the work of translators. As translator David Stormer noted in a comment to one of our recent blog posts, quality translation involves “the creativity and discipline of professionals specialized in making the foreign sound familiar and the incomprehensible clear.”

Adaptation of copy differs from translation in that with adaptation it doesn’t particularly matter what the copy says. What matters is what the copy does. Much of ordinary communication is meant to explain, guide, inform, not necessarily to call the reader/listener to action or meld a brand ever more deeply into the subconscious. Copywriting is not ordinary communication.

Our own agency (JAPANtranslation) is one of those that deals mostly with standard texts - i.e., ordinary documents that describe, inform or explain - though we also offer persuasive Japanese copywriting services. In fact, we work with adaptation agencies on projects to provide additional insight and consulting. An adaptation company vs. a translation company boils down to a different business model (and price point). If you’re dealing with a more general translation agency (such as ours), you can still get high-quality results, but you need to be prepared (more tips coming soon!) and you may need to provide more overall direction rather than just hand the work off to a vendor and hope for the best. We’ll be posting more on this topic in early May.

Have we left out any important points about adaptation companies cf. translation services companies? Comments are very welcome! (Scroll down to add your comment.)

We welcome your involvement!

• Found this post useful? Join our mailing list! Your email address is safe with us. We send out mailings on the first of every month just to remind you what’s new on the blog.
• Feel free to post your relevant comment about this article in the “LEAVE A COMMENT” box, below.
• Contribute an article to this blog.
• Or, just click the “Share This” button (below) to bookmark or email this post to your network.

About the authors

• Lawrence LaFerla is the division head for JAPANtranslation and blogger in chief at “Marketing on the Japanese web.” He works in sunny Osaka.
• Hannah Smalltree is the senior editor of SearchDataManagement.com, an online technology publication, and freelance copywriter, based in Massachusetts.

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Nicholas Rose: Private banking advisor

International copywriting case study
We keep telling you how valuable it is to think carefully about international copywriting projects, and here’s some more inspiration. One of our favorite copywriting success stories is about our development of Japanese web copy for our client Nicholas Rose. As the sole Japan-focused partner at Invest Partners Wealth Management AG, he’s responsible for marketing to Japanese web surfers who are interested in Swiss private banking and wealth management.

When we worked on this project a couple of years ago, private banking had recently become more popular in Japan. Prudent risk-taking by Japanese investors was more common than it had been in the 1990s. So, off-shore providers such as Invest Partners were able to compete in Japan against a growing number of domestic private banking firms. Invest Partners came to us to launch their website, invest-partners.jp, which needed to emphasize that ‘Swiss private banking is just as safe as savings and investments offered inside Japan, and comes with unique advantages.’

Now, we consumers, Japanese or otherwise, don’t buy financial services the way we buy music or clothing. We don’t tend to make important purchasing decisions on a whim while browsing a website, no matter how trustworthy the seller. Japanese in the demographic targeted by firms providing wealth management services tend to hesitate to identify themselves in an online contact form, let alone make any sort of hasty commitment. So, Invest Partners’ goal was simply to convert web visitors to viable prospects. They planned to define “conversions” as each occurrence when a visitor was persuaded to make initial contact by sending an email or making a phone call. From there, the eventual path toward signing the necessary account opening documents would be made through direct communication, often over the course of months. Easy, right? Nope. Not so simple at all. Even if the first sales step is merely to make contact, sites aimed at such a sensitive market as this require incredibly meticulous native copywriting in order to convey complete trustworthiness. That’s where we came in. We needed to build exactly the right internal team to fuss over every single word together with Nicholas, directly.

As luck would have it, one regular member of our Japanese copywriting team had written private banking material for Citigroup. For this project, she worked closely with Nicholas along with our project manager and the Japanese search engine marketing team at Wasabi Communications to rewrite Invest Partners’ boilerplate text for the Japanese site. The three-way conferences between the SEM firm, the client and us were indispensable. That’s where the real success was created. They launched the site and we held our breath.

During the first year as Nicholas and Wasabi both monitored the actual site usage, they paid close attention to the “persuasion architecture” – or text, navigation and images used to persuade websurfers to take action. The first iteration took some tweaking. Honestly, early on, none of us felt completely sure that Japanese prospects in this market would respond via the web. But then things started to turn around. Conversion rates rose. Our heart rates dropped back down to normal levels. And most importantly, Nicholas and Invest Partners saw their Japanese business take off.

Today, this well oiled marketing machine of a website is generating quality prospects and the investment has paid for itself. It’s not magic. It’s all a matter of careful collaboration. When a client team, a search engine marketing team and a copywriting team work together closely, it’s possible to come up with persuasive copy even for the most sensitive markets.

We welcome your involvement!

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About the authors

• Lawrence LaFerla is the division head for JAPANtranslation and blogger in chief at “Marketing on the Japanese web.” He works in sunny Osaka.
• Hannah Smalltree is the senior editor of SearchDataManagement.com, an online technology publication, and freelance copywriter, based in Massachusetts.

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Chocolate covered coffee beans

International advertising
Every now and then we want to post “reality checks” as a way to clarify or qualify claims we’re making in recent posts, especially where we spot ambiguities in our own writing and may have second thoughts after receiving thoughtful and thought-provoking feedback from readers.

Global or local?
In our post the other day, “English-to-Japanese translation for persuasion: Words to the wise (and words of warning!),” we detoured around the fact that most very large, multilingual advertising campaigns are properly handled not by translation firms but by global advertising agencies and/or adaptation firms. At the more local level, i.e. assuming you have a campaign in one language and want to expand just to one other language for starters, we think it’s possible to create great copy with the assistance of a translation firm in the target country. Since we’re a translation firm in Japan that blogs in English, the latter scenario naturally becomes the focus of our blogging. Truthfully, though? Most professionals in the translation industry are wary of providing valuable marketing assistance at translation agency rates. It’s controversial and worth discussing. We welcome comments from others in the industry.

Translate or rewrite?
Regarding the same article, we received warm applause from marketing and copywriting people but some misgivings from professional translators. The linguists thought that our interchangeable usage of the words “translation” and “copywriting” was particularly derelict. Well, to be honest, many more web searches are made for “translation” than for “copywriting,” so we used phrases that included both words heavily in that post. There are also gray areas where whoever is managing an international advertising campaign might not know whether to have the source language ad copy translated for the target language or completely rewritten.

This leaves the question: How do you choose?

The answer: Case by case. Ask a translator or a translation firm in the target country for their opinions. And, if it’s a high-budget, crucial campaign, pay an agency in the target country to test the translation out on native customers.

Faithful or bold?
On our post yesterday introducing adaptation/transcreation agencies, C. Turney comments, “I really enjoyed your analogy, ‘Adaptation/transcreation is to translation what copywriting is to writing.’” Thanks! This distinction between international copywriting and translation is larger than most people outside our industry realize. Translation is a profoundly conservative art. Translators faithfully convey meaning. Copywriting, by contrast, is a radically creative skill. If you have an ironic ad slogan that works well in the UK, it may not be well received in Japanese translation, no matter how beautifully and faithfully translated. A Japanese copywriting team can write an entirely new slogan that conveys the brand’s attitude and the campaign’s persuasive effect. But notice that the meaning of the original slogan is completely beside the point.

Note that translators work for cents per word for long texts and hourly for important lines of text. But don’t ask them to work at these rates for ad copy worth thousands. In upcoming posts we’ll explain why crucial, creative and bold ad copy requires a team. It also requires an adequate budget.

Big budget or moderate budget?
Speaking of budget. If you’ve got a huge one - huge budget, we mean - and a multilingual campaign to run, there really is no reason to be reading this series about working with translation agencies. Instead, stop reading here and contact one of the adaptation/transcreation firms we listed yesterday. But if you want to target one foreign language and you have a moderate budget, stay tuned to our blog this month. We have some ideas just for you.

We welcome your involvement!

• Found this post useful? Join our mailing list! Your email address is safe with us. We send out mailings on the first of every month just to remind you what’s new on the blog.
• Feel free to post your relevant comment about this article in the “LEAVE A COMMENT” box, below.
• Contribute an article to this blog.
• Or, just click the “Share This” button (below) to bookmark or email this post to your network.

About the author

• Lawrence LaFerla is the division head for JAPANtranslation and blogger in chief at “Marketing on the Japanese web.” He works in sunny Osaka.

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Some people in the translation industry think that “adaptation” and “transcreation” are just buzzword equivalents for plain, old translation.

Agencies that are pioneers in adaptation/transcreation beg to differ. Adaptation/transcreation is to translation what copywriting is to writing. Here’s a sampling of web copy from some these agencies’ sites…

Sternkopf Communications
“We don’t translate. We create. Rather than direct translation, we always strive for the perfect adaptation.”

Bauzá & Associates
“Transcreation is the creative adaptation of marketing, sales and advertising copy in the target language”

NTIS New Zealand
“Translators translate, whereas Transcreation is an entirely different ballgame, involving the creativity and discipline of professionals specialised in adaptation.”

Vision Communications
“Transcreation: For services related to the adaptation of promotional material”

ICP
“…project manage the adaptation, transcreation, production and delivery of international advertising…”

Mother Tongue
“…anyone in advertising or marketing who needs to be sure that the foreign-language versions of their copy will be as good as the original in every way…”

Text Appeal
“…help global brands adapt their marketing campaigns to different markets, languages and cultures…”

ATS
“…strategic marketing analysis, concept development, copywriting and copy-editing; adaptation and transcreation; concept checking and transculturization…”

So, what’s the difference between translation and adaptation?

• Adaptation supports marketing. Translation is much more general.
• Adaptation involves changing both words and meaning but keeping the attitude and persuasive effect. Translation involves changing words but keeping meanings.
• We describe successful adaptation with words such as “bold” and “creative.” We describe successful translation with words such as “faithful.”
• Adaptation inevitably requires a team (or a series of teams). Translation can be done by an individual (though independent proofreaders are often involved).

Be sure to check out our series of articles on international copywriting.

We welcome your involvement!

• Found this post useful? Join our mailing list! Your email address is safe with us. We send out mailings on the first of every month just to remind you what’s new on the blog.
• Feel free to post your relevant comment about this article in the “LEAVE A COMMENT” box, below.
• Contribute an article to this blog.
• Or, just click the “Share This” button (below) to bookmark or email this post to your network.

About the author

• Lawrence LaFerla is the division head for JAPANtranslation and blogger in chief at “Marketing on the Japanese web.” He works in sunny Osaka.

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Part one of our five-part series on international copywriting
Whether you’re a small business owner, an advertising/PR agency professional or a corporate marketing executive, how you approach the process of translating persuasive copy – annual reports, advertising, web copy or press releases – can make or break international marketing efforts. Find out how and why companies outsource copywriting to translation agencies more often lately. And, learn more about common pitfalls you must avoid in your next copy translation project.

Graphic: Maniackers Design

Translation for persuasion
Most of us in the translation services business can list some hilarious instances when clients have come to us with overly literal translations that had been done by novice freelancers. When the original English ad copy for high-priced women’s accessories includes the expression “Love makes the world go ’round,” translations in other languages may use entirely different local idioms to correctly carry a similar feeling and convey the attitude that’s supposed to attach to the product line advertised. The original idiom, after all, is supposed to answer the question “How great is love?” It’s not supposed to attempt to explain the physics of whatever it is that actually causes the earth to spin on its axis. Dull, un-persuasive or nonsensical examples of literally translated copy may seem funny to us after the fact – but not funny to the company who runs that copy in an expensive, glossy, four-color print ad to introduce their new line to the lucrative, yet discerning, Japanese market.

The goal of translating copy for a new country, language and culture shouldn’t be to say exactly the same thing in all languages. In fact, you can’t say exactly the same thing in every language. The goal is to get equivalent reactions in each language. It’s not always an easy task, but executed correctly – the payoff is well worth the extra care.

So, we’ve put together a series of blog articles designed to help anyone who needs to have persuasive copy, such as sales, marketing or advertising materials, translated for targeted overseas readers. We’ve pooled our collective knowledge, gleaned from our experience as an agency that handles a whole lot of English-to-Japanese translation and from our broader network of partners. If you don’t have time to read the series in its entirety, just save the following nugget of wisdom: Copy rewrites in foreign languages require more of your involvement and cost more than basic translation orders…but it transfers the marketing value that your team has already created to millions more existing or potential customers, so it’s sooooo worth it. The key is to make sure that the copy’s meaning is not lost in translation.

Why is this such a big deal?
Whether you’re translating annual reports, advertisements, website text or press release copy, consider all the work that went into the original. Your team most likely arrived at the copy through a long versioning process, may have run the versions past focus groups, probably made multiple revisions and finally had to get approvals from at least one or two main stakeholders. If you hope to make the same impact across international markets, we have an inconvenient truth to share with you: That creative process has to be revisited by native teams in each target language and culture.

Sounds exhausting and costly, right? Don’t panic! Repeating the process for new languages can go much faster than the first time. In fact, you’re partway there if you make it a habit to preserve some kind of background documentation such as the original copywriting brief and meeting notes for each new campaign (being a packrat pays off!), and you make sure to show translation vendors the visuals that accompany the copy in the campaigns you have them translate. Then, it’s only a matter of having each native team revisit your goals in the context of the target market.

This re-run of the creative process pays off. We promise. When you’ve already invested in developing a killer marketing campaign in one language, you’re practically assured to increase the value of that investment by localizing the copy for other languages. For example, does your company’s website (or your client’s website) truly speak to 70 million Japanese web users? If not, why not? The advantages of localizing copy are clear. You can significantly multiply the reach of any campaign.

Common global copywriting pitfalls

But before you start, it’s a good idea to know the most common pitfalls to avoid:

Pitfall #1: Choosing the wrong translation company
Of course, if you have the budget, you may want to consider the option of going to a local ad agency in each country you’re campaign targets. There are ad agencies that’ll help you with translation, and translation agencies that’ll help you with advertising. And, as the world becomes smaller, there are “adaptation agencies” springing up that are a kind of cross-breed. (Learn more about adaptation agencies here.) But the tips we’re offering here assume you’re working with a translation agency.

There are many translation companies out there – but not all of them are a good fit for you and your goals. It’s critical to find a vendor that matches your specific project and has the right experience, work style and copywriting processes to handle the project smoothly and successfully. What worked for your friend’s company or project might not work for you. Our own translation firm is one of the fastest growing agencies in Japan, but we know that we’re not the best fit for all projects – and we’re not afraid to tell people that. Our advice: Find the right match for your company. Know enough about the process to help guide the project, so it meets your goals. We know you’re reading this and wondering what criteria to use. Right? Well, there are too many to explain in this one modest little introductory post. So, we delve into this more in this post – but, as you plan your project, compare possible vendors carefully.

Pitfall #2: Being unprepared when placing a translation order
This sounds obvious, but the way that you work with a translation agency greatly affects your results. The more direction you give your translation services team, the clearer your goals and the more background materials you can provide – the better. Unless you work with a high-end adaptation agency, you’ll need to put a bit of thought and effort into the way you outsource your translation order. Check out our detailed advice on this right here in this post.

Pitfall #3: Overlooking the professional distinction between translation and copywriting
We have this straight from the experts. Last year we approached a well known American copywriter to see if she would review our own translation company website on her blog. We were delighted that she accepted! The Copywriting Maven usually turns such requests away. We were in luck.

She made some key points about multilingual copywriting that identify exactly why it matters who you choose as your vendor:

Copywriters know that writing powerful, persuasive copy is tough enough when English is your first language. This is especially true when writing conversationally and that actually can add a second layer of difficulty. Common slang, figures of speech, and subtle shades of meaning are what we weave together to get our prospects and customers nodding, resonating and responding to our messages.

Which makes the whole process of translation so dang hard and fraught with peril. When we transport our advertising messages from their native language base to another language – with its own slang and common understandings – well … we can only guess at the magnitude for ourselves and our clients if mistakes are made.

When you need persuasive copy translated, make sure that your translation vendor understands that you want native copywriting, not just translation.

Pitfall #4: Ignoring or downplaying special sensitivities and cultural differences
Cultures vary greatly – especially when you’re talking about Western vs. Eastern cultures. Sure there are social, industrial and occupational subcultures that transcend East/West, but within these demographic groups are even more specialized subsets of buyers, both B2B and B2C – buyers who have to be approached in a specific, culturally savvy way to indentify personally with your product or service. For large, corporate campaigns you may need to outsource to multiple, specialized vendors – branding/marketing, translation, etc. – to work on strategy or setup additional focus groups. Of course if your campaign is smaller and simpler maybe you don’t need such a huge team, but just know that specialized markets require specialized approaches. Ignore this at your peril! (Check out this post to read a case study of one company that mastered this.)

OK – so that’s a brief look at what NOT to do. We hope this post hasn’t filled you with anxiety. Better to dwell on the positive results you can expect when you get your campaigns translated right. The more you globalize your copy the more you’ll feel “The sky’s the limit!” So, stay tuned for more tips on what TO DO and learn how to get the most out of your translation project. And, please take a minute to leave a comment or question. What other common pitfalls have you encountered in the copy translation process? Do you have any funny or scary translation horror stories to share? Scroll down to the comments box and let us all in on it!

We welcome your involvement!

• Found this post useful? Join our mailing list! Your email address is safe with us. We send out mailings on the first of every month just to remind you what’s new on the blog.
• Feel free to post your relevant comment about this article in the “LEAVE A COMMENT” box, below.
• Contribute an article to this blog.
• Or, just click the “Share This” button (below) to bookmark or email this post to your network.

About the authors

• Lawrence LaFerla is the division head for JAPANtranslation and blogger in chief at “Marketing on the Japanese web.” He works in sunny Osaka.
• Hannah Smalltree is the senior editor of SearchDataManagement.com, an online technology publication, and freelance copywriter, based in Massachusetts.

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Actually, it has nothing to do with Tokyo subways or train lines and everything to do with the planet’s most successful and influential websites, starting with the obvious: Google, Wikipedia, YouTube etc. replacing the heart of Tokyo. But the closer you look, as the lines spread out around the global village, you’ll notice some cheeky neighborhood naming and interesting website choices. (Did you click the thumbnail, above?)

Choices were based on all sorts of factors ranging from global branding/marketing to design to usability to plain old “coolness,” but the overriding factor has to have been influential-ness.

Order the huge paper version for your office wall. They’re printing only 1000 of them, so contact iA while supplies last!
http://informationarchitects.jp/web-trend-map-2008-beta/

The live, clickable version…
http://informationarchitects.jp/start/

Do you Digg? If you Digg, then Digg this:
http://digg.com/tech_news/Web_Trends_Map_2008

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http://japanese-web.com/about/ 

More articles coming in March.

By the way, we’re looking for contributors. See the same link, above, for more information.

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Here’s the way we explain the distinction on our company site:

The use of translation memory management software (TMM) is not to be confused with machine translation (MT) such as automated online translation applications that translate at the level of vocabulary and grammar - and produce results that typically read like amusing gibberish. TMM assists human translators by allowing them to break a document’s text into segments (sentences, headings or clauses) and pair each source language segment with a translated version. The application manages these human-translated segments so that the same native translator (or another native translator sharing the same database) can call up and recycle the segments as appropriate when working on updates of the same document or similar documents. The result is as natural and native as any other human translation. The use of computer-assisted translation tools saves translation professionals time, so it saves translation clients money. And there are other benefits. You get better standardization and consistency within and between documents.

Yes, sir, it’s still human translation
I think that clients easily grasp the fact that computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools save time and reduce costs. But they don’t readily understand that we’re still talking about human translation, that TMM software is just a tool in a translation team’s toolbox, or that it helps the team edit the client’s information assets with increased care, consistency and clarity.

They understand “translation” but misunderstand “translation memory”
Even if laypeople aren’t completely hip to professional translation software, more and more businesses (large, medium and small) these days understand the need for quality translation. Haven’t we all noticed the widespread localization (a.k.a. localisation) of just about every business website lately? The web is soooo worldwide that there are no “foreign languages” anymore, just local languages. More and more people outside the translation industry are coming around to the understanding that their organizations are situated in a multicultural/multilingual world that requires “global communication,” as clichéd as that already sounds. Members of our profession are valued as intercultural interpreters.

Humans have human sense, and software applications don’t
I guess we need first to explain to clients what human translators do that automated translation software can’t.

The other day I was chatting with a client who shared with me a rolling-on-the-floor laughable document that some speech-to-text transcription software had produced. Instances like this remind us, to our great relief, that human labor is still indispensable even in 2008. In translation work we can’t produce quality documents without being humans endowed with great writing skills and a completely native mastery of the target language and its overarching culture.

A professional translator makes sense of the meaning of each part of a document by understanding the whole document. Likewise, she understands the whole context by following the intended meanings of the parts. Like a back-and-forth interpretive dance. It’s likely that she’ll have to “read between the lines” and rely on a broader understanding of, say, marketing objectives that aren’t even stated in the document.

A software application alone - no matter how fancy the algorithms you program into it - can’t perform such feats. And it seems doubtful whether it’ll be possible in our lifetimes, if ever. Only a human can follow the sequence of thoughts and intended meanings throughout an entire document.

Professional copywriters have the good sense to translate entire phrases as equivalents to phrases in the source copy even if the equivalence is in the impact of the words rather than their literal meaning. And they have the good sense to leave some words untranslated for effect. No software is savvy enough to make skillful decisions like that.

Software and its limitations
When a client hears the phrase “translation software,” does he or she imagine a skilled copywriter working with tools? Or does he or she imagine machine translation (sans human)? An unscientific polling of project managers leads me to expect that most people imagine the latter. And no wonder. We all know the free web applications based on SYSTRAN technologies such as AltaVista Babel Fish, don’t we?

Have you heard of the way biologists use the word “translation”? (I found this in Wikipedia.) Not sure I get it, but,

In translation, messenger RNA (mRNA) is decoded to produce a specific polypeptide according to the rules specified by the genetic code.

The process seems to follow predictable laws.

But…

Linguistic translation is completely different, isn’t it? Unlike mRNA, text requires shared subjective understandings. Linguistic translation requires a certain cultural accuracy and pure savvy that no computer algorithm can possibly approach. When Walter Mondale in 1984 asked Gary Hart “Where’s the beef?” he wasn’t trying to locate some meat. He was trying to win the Democratic nomination. How would Babel Fish translate that debate into Spanish, German, or French? When we express something in our native language from a foreign source we don’t just decode words and sentence structures and match them up according to a language pair dictionary. If we did we couldn’t expect culturally appropriate and comprehensible language to flow out automatically. Right?

Machine translation creates output that often reads like absurdist poetry rather than meaningful prose. And often very funny absurd poetry at that.

Today I entered this sentence into Google Translate:

“We knew it from the word go.”

English speaking natives will understand that the idiom “from the word go” means “from the beginning.” I had Google translate it into “Japanese,” and got:

“Wareware ni iku to iu kotoba wo shiteru kara da.”

Japanese readers will know that this is ungrammatical (just a clause with no subject) and meaningless. It reads like:

“Because (I/we/they/he/she/you/it) know the word(s) of us to go..”

If you replaced some characters you could make it grammatical, but idioms are expressions of culture. Interpreting an idiomatic phrase in a literal way, as free online translation does, results in a loss of meaning (and style, too).

Okay, okay… This is not news to any of us. We all know what MT produces. But this is what clients fear we might use on their documents.

Explaining CAT tools to laypersons
Is it any wonder that the idea of using translation tools gives people a negative feeling? Inside the translation industry we know the complete difference - like apples and orangutans - between Trados and Babel Fish. But do clients get it? Can they get it?

This is where I’m stuck. I’m in translation marketing. I’m not a linguist. I’d love to get some comments to this post. (See Comment box, below.) There must be a useful, quick and clear way of explaining this to clients. I know basically how translation memory apps work by watching Japanese translators work in our office, but I’m not sure whether my explanations to client prospects are persuasive when the question comes up. The clearest difference I see is that CAT tools organize entire documents of text that has been translated by human translators. Entire documents, not word-by-word dictionary translations. These tools simply help translators organize segments of human-translated text inside the document. And…erm… Is there any more concise way to explain it to a lay client?

Of course the smart option for huge translation agencies such as WorldLingo is to offer both machine translation and human translation. Wicked smart! Or… Does that only cause more confusion??

:: :: :: :: ::

By the way, if you own or manage a translation agency, please visit our new page for translation agencies!

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Well, yesterday we launched a special pricing only for overseas translation agencies. This should interest translation companies with projects that require native Japanese translator-and-proofreader teams that specialize in a particular industry (such as pharmaceuticals, patents, IT, and so on).

Check our new Agency-to-agency services page for details about the new pricing, further cost reductions for TM matches and repetitions, and more.

Also, this blog will officially launch later in February. You’re invited to subscribe now and we’ll mail you an announcement when things are really rolling.

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As much as growing businesses are tempted to market on the Japanese web, it can be time-consuming and frustrating hiring both the right language help and the right technical help at reasonable prices.

Most Japanese web shoppers search in Japanese, and won’t find a site without at least a page of Japanese, anyway.

Hire a qualified web project manager to review your project’s business objectives and the expected customer experience of the Japanese web content, the two common starting points. Once you or your client start seeing results and developing a sense of who the site’s Japanese customers are, the business is primed for more developed Japanese web marketing strategies to attract more precisely targeted traffic and convert more visitors to customers.

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Graphic:
Maniackers Design

Okay, I intend to make a serious, committed effort to write daily for this blog. But the first posts will define the entire mission of the blog, so they have to be really good. You see? For that reason, I’m delaying the official launch until February. Right now our department is overwhelmed with client orders. Clients come first. Then the February launch. Then words on this blog will flow out of me, and flow, and flow. You’ll see. Once things are started I won’t belabor the writing process. From then onward, regardless of our busyness, you can expect to see posts all the time. PROMISE! You won’t be able to shut me up. Haha.

For now, readers are invited to play with our “Swicki,” a search engine focused on Japanese localization, translation, web development, web design, web content, branding, SEO, marketing and copywriting. Try these searches and feel free to edit the search results:

• Japanese localization
• Japanese translation
• Japanese web development
• Japanese web design
• Japanese web content
• Japanese branding
• Japanese SEO
• Japanese search marketing
• Japanese marketing
• Japanese copywriting

Honestly! Useful, readable content is coming to this blog next month!

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