Media and translation, two images of cultural identity

Translation and mass communication have common characteristics as they are both instances of communication. Hatim and Mason, well-known translators who published extensively in the area of translation clarified that translation is “an act of communication which attempts to relay, across cultural and linguistic boundaries, another act of communication.” This means translation supports transferring messages across languages and cultures, it allows one community to understand and learn about global matters it would not normally have had access to without the use of translation, while media communicate messages directly to audiences locally and globally.

The translation of media content.

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.” – Joseph Goebbels –Chief propagandist for the Nazi Party

70–85 million people died in WW2” about 3% of the 1940 world population (est. 2.3 billion)”

How did the Nazi regime manage to control the minds of the German public and promote such devastating ideas leading to the catastrophe of WW2?

Is it possible nowadays to isolate people intellectually and fill their minds, shape their perspectives using one-source knowledge?

Lucky for us, technological developments, globalization and the increasing use of translation have made it impossible to prevent individuals from getting exposed to different ideas from all over the world, the translation of media content allowed for global collective thinking, political speeches, articles, talk shows, TV and Radio reports, and every piece and form of information is available in all spoken human languages. It’s impossible to formulate a lie strong enough to last and do such damage to humanity.

Translation of Multimedia content (localization)

Translation can widen the scope of a company by tapping the untapped markets. Through localization, a corporation’s content of any kind can be made suitable for targeted regions considering their cultural differences, which brings us to a critical subject of how human translation is always preferred to machine translation, a human translator is able to identify the meaning behind a text, understand different cultural references, and comprehend industry-specific terms, he has the ability to deliver a copy in a language familiar to natives of any culture, unlike machine translation which often renders content divorced of any context or meaning.

Now, let’s tackle deeply the benefits of media translation for corporations!

When digital marketing material (blog posts – promotional videos – infographics, google ads, and social media content) is managed and rendered according to the requirements of a target audience and when it is available in multiple languages, your reach of limited audience is widened, making it easy for your company to trade in various markets in a more efficient way, which improves your sales by pulling the market for you in less time.