Translation for the Real Estate, Construction and Housing Sectors
The pandemic had a huge impact on the real estate and construction sectors, particularly in countries such as Spain. In the light of the many challenges and setbacks these sectors have undergone in recent years; it is now more important than ever for construction and housing companies to maintain their competitive edge. Quality translation can help you to reach your target market.
An increasing number of people are choosing to invest in property abroad, both as a second home, and for retirement. Furthermore, real estate has become a popular investment for wealthy Russian and Arab businessmen; who will expect communications in their own language. This means that, in order to stay competitive, many real estate companies are expanding their operations into different countries. QuickSilver Translate will help you adapt your sales materials to suit different languages, and markets.
Translation and Real Estate
Each language, and market, has its own unique real estate abbreviations and colloquialisms. For this reason alone, using machine translation for real estate listings is unwise.
Machine translation AI’s use algorithms: if something doesn’t “fit” an existing algorithm, it won’t be recognised and translated correctly. Unfortunately (for the machines), human languages are full of expressions that are improvised, illogical, and don’t fit to patterns! Human translators are much better at sensing such nuances and finding appropriate equivalents for them in another language.
You can see this for yourself by taking a listing from a Chinese site (or any language you are unfamiliar with) and putting it through one of the free translation engines. You’ll see that the resulting translation is awkward, and sometimes barely understandable. If you’re thinking “what the…!” — then you can be sure that your potential clients will think the same! Using free machine translation services is often a false economy, there really is no substitute (yet) for a professional translation service. Although, if your budget is tight, you might want to give Post-Editing Machine Translation some consideration.
It’s certainly true that you can take a simple short text — that’s not very expressive or creative — run it through Google Translate and get a perfectly acceptable translation. The problem is, most translation needs are not short, simple, unexpressive texts. In fact, effective marketing copy needs to be expressive and engaging. While free online translation may be tempting, and will communicate the vague idea, your customers will expect better. Buyers and investors will inevitably use a company that communicates effectively in their own language. Poor translations will hurt your business.
Translation and the Construction Industry
The benefits of working with a translator who is specialised in the construction industry cannot be overemphasised.
To take one example: a common source of confusion to translators and construction engineers alike is the difference between the UK and the US ton. In the US and Canada, a ton is equal to 20 hundredweight; which means it weighs 2000 pounds, or 907.185 kilograms. In the UK, confusingly, there are 112 pounds to the hundredweight, and therefore 2240 pounds (1016.047 kg) to the ton.
To distinguish between these two measures, a UK ton is called a long ton, whilst a US ton is a short ton. The metric tonne (Spanish: una tonelada, French: une tonne) is another weight altogether, namely 1000 kg, or megagram. The metric tonne may also be spelt ton, but (in standard English, at least) the pronunciation does not change.
It is exactly this sort of detail which an inexperienced or non-specialised translator will miss or slip up on, with potentially very serious consequences.
Contact us!
To get a free quote for translation of real estate or construction documents, or indeed any of our translation services, simply use the Quote Request form to upload your documents or files, and we’ll send you an estimate of our services.
