Translation is like pizza

When you are craving carbs and melted cheese after a long day, putting a frozen pizza in the oven might be good enough. Just like a machine translation might be good enough if you just want to get the gist of what a text is about. Over time, you will find out which brand or tool works best for you.

You can pimp your frozen pizza with a drizzle of olive oil and some fresh herbs or tomatoes, just like you can edit your machine translation to make it sound a bit better. But it will still and always be a convenience product with questionable ingredients, good enough for a quick fix, but nothing to impress a date with.

If you want to stand out from the competition and present yourself as a great cook, you’ll have to invest a bit of effort. Make the pizza dough from scratch and give it time to rise. The longer, the better. Use best-quality tomatoes, olive oil and herbs for your sauce, again letting it simmer for quite some time to improve the taste. And finally, top the pizza with the ingredients that your date prefers. Yes, even if they like pineapples. 😋

Similarly, creating a translated text that really speaks to your intended audience takes time, expertise and knowledge of their preferences. It should not sound like a translation, but like a text written from scratch in their language. Sprinkled with the words they use themselves (aka keywords) and metaphors they can relate to, even if they differ from the ones you would choose.

If you feel a little overwhelmed by it all, take your date out to the best pizza place in town. The one with the wood-fired stone oven, secret sauce recipe, authentic atmosphere and a feeling for the right ingredients, combinations and timing that comes from years of experience. And give your important text to a professional translator with the right tools, expertise and passion for languages to show your audience that you really care about them.

Are you looking for mouth-watering texts in German?

Get in touch and let me cook up something for you!