At Geo Language Services, we’re fans of market research. Always have been. Superior knowledge and a wealth of information right at your fingertips, if you know how to ask the right questions? Right up our street…

So we’ve decided to make it official. As of this month we’re members of the Market Research Society (MRS). Even though our MRS membership is fresh out of the box, we’ve spent years honing our market research translation and we know exactly what it takes to get your surveys ready for launch, your verbatims coded and the final reports on your research perfect. We’re up-to-date with the latest in industry standards and we’re geared up and ready to help with your next international market research project.

It’s easy to assume that once you’ve decided on a set of questions for a survey, the hard part is over, and the questions can be literally translated to the target language and sent out into the world. Surely it’s as easy as translating word-by-word?

Not quite.

A lot of care and consideration goes into coming up with the wording of questions, making sure they’re free from bias, that open-ended questions allow room for informative responses and closed-ended ones are clear and unambiguous. The same attention is needed for the translated versions, with the added difficulty of making tricky decisions on tone and the nuance of the target language.

Using the simplest example, where English has only one option for “you”, many languages have both formal and informal options (like the outdated “thou” and “thee”, in English), so you might choose different wording for a survey for children and teens than you would for adults. Other languages, like Japanese, have even more levels of formality and it takes a skilled linguist to navigate the most appropriate way to translate. A focus group won’t be very effective if the tone of the questions makes the participants uncomfortable.

With the potential risk of wasting time and money on research that doesn’t pan out, you want to make sure you’ve got a translation service provider you know you can trust.

And that’s where we come in. With a network of over 3,000 translators, we’ve got linguists with in-house experience in top market research agencies and specialists in just about everything from Ad hoc to Z values, and everything in between. Add in our experienced project managers and shiny new Market Research Society membership, and you’ve got a market research translation dream team ready to tackle your next project.

You can find out more about our services and the team here, and if you’re ready to get the ball rolling on your next project, or just want to have a chat about market research translation, you can give us a call on +44 (0)1483 577 750, or email help@geolanguages.co.uk.

Market research translation company, Market research translation services, Market research translation