It's time. Your customer base is widening. Your marketing strategy is paying off. Bottom line? Your business is ready for the next step: Globalization. Get it done right and you're well on your way to winning over another segment of the population. Screw it up and that's it. No more first impressions for you.

So, here you are, ready to move forward with the translation on some of your English product materials. It's cake, right? You took 2 years of Spanish. Translation is just one of those incidental sidenotes to your overall marketing agenda, right? Wrong, wrong, and, uh, wrong.

It all starts and ends with the right translation of your product/information/marketing materials. You absolutely cannot take this step in your quest for market domination for granted. Why, you ask? We are marketed to every minute of every single day whether we want to be or not. Everything from artery-clogging fast-food restaurants to that new gas-guzzling H3 in front of us waiting at the light effects us.

Sometimes we are marketed at with text, sometimes with graphics. Whatever the medium, the message has to be received in a nonnegative way by your target audience. This means that if you're using text, you better make sure you've got it right.

People are critics and especially critical about people marketing at them. If you want your message to get across to a Spanish speaker, for example, you better understand a few things about who that person is. One of the essentials is the language s/he uses. Go ahead and try to market your product to 20-something bachelors in Spain using colloquial Spanish from Mexico. Guess what you've got. Zilcho. No wait, worse than zilcho. You've got people that know about your product but felt they were lied to about it. You didn't care about who they were. You figured they were just like every other Spanish-speaking bachelor out there. That's not going to bode too well for you or your business when they complain to everyone they know about your product before you have a chance to correct your mistake. Give enough people a bad taste in their mouth and it'll be time to pack up and go back home. Better luck next time (if you even get the chance).

So, before you rush off and do something rash, stop. Get out a pen and paper and find your original business plan. Turn to the marketing section and find the questions you asked yourself about who your market was originally. This time, though, ask yourself those questions in relation to the international market you'd like to appeal to.

1. Who are these people?
2. What language do they speak?
3. Where do they live?

Is your market Spanish-speaking 20-somethings living in the Southwestern part of the United States or 30-somethings living on the coast of Spain? Big, big difference.

Next, look for a translator that knows something (a lot of something, preferably) about your target audience. Ask each professional translator (not your nephew that did a 3-month tour with the Peace Corps in Costa Rica) you interview about their relationship with the target audience.

1. Do they know the language?
2. Do they understand the culture of those who speak the language?
3. Do they have continual contact with the language and culture of your target audience?
4. Do they understand your material and what and how you want to present it to the target audience?

Essentially, it comes down to finding the right translator that can get across your message in a way that makes you look like you know what you're talking about in a language you don't know. By underestimating the importance of translation in your business, you are setting yourself up for international failure. Take heed, though. Answer the questions above and you'll be on your way to global market dominance. Or at least you won't look like a fool.

Clint Tustison is a translation evangelist spreading the good word of translation throughout the land while helping translators improve their business. His home on the Internet can be found at spanish-translation-help.com.