In this article I will discuss my Spanish Translation Advertising Marketing service.

I provide Spanish translations of advertising and marketing material to a number of sectors including:

Holiday Resorts

Spanish Golf Clubs

Museums

Art Galleries

Cultural Centres

Tourist Boards

Music Events

Travel Companies

Spanish Translation Advertising Marketing origins

My interest in Spanish translation of advertising and marketing starts in about 1989.

At that time there was a huge interest in Spanish holiday resorts.

Companies, Spanish or otherwise were building holiday resorts and tourists were flocking to them.

Spanish Translation for Golf Resorts

The Spanish term “Campo de Golf” does not always refer solely to a golf club or course.

Rather it refers to an entire residential complex.

These are places where people can rent or purchase properties.

They tend to live there permanently although shorter stays are also popular.

I translate the advertising and marketing information for such “villages”.

The target audience are often ex pats or anyone who wants to live in an English speaking environment within Spain.

Some of my first work was translating Spanish text to English for such resorts.

At that time creating a good translation was not without its difficulties.

The business owners provided texts in Spanish.

It became complex because the consortiums of investors may have been from various countries.

They may not have always spoken Spanish.

Yet they needed advertising text in Spanish.

My personal opinion was that these Spanish texts worked very well for Spanish people.

They were written in a way that was attractive to Spanish people.

However, they did not always engage the English speaker.

I met and listened to British people and they frequently said that they need more hard information up front.

Nonetheless, the more emotional text was also useful for capturing people’s imagination.

Therefore, my work was partly translating and partly recreating.

Developing Spanish Translation for Advertising

When you first start as a translator there is a tendency to be very excited about what you know.

You look at the Spanish text and even before you start translating you see ways you could re write it.

Thus, before translating Spanish to English you are forming an idea of what the text means.

From your first reading you establish the key points.

So far so good.

In fact, reading and questioning is encouraged.

Simply reading without seeking a perfect understanding is not much good.

However, when it comes to translating you have to put the brakes on.

When you translate actually you are showing a person’s ideas in a new language.

Because of this you can’t award yourself the freedom to completely re interpret the source language.

There is an absolute obligation to translate what the author has said, not what you think they should have said.

However, that does not mean that you can remain silent if you think it won’t work in the target language.

Even worse if it could cause problems, I think that you should share you concerns with your client.