How does ‘SEO Translation’ Affect Creativity?
One issue that will be raised when the concept of “SEO Translation” comes to shape, will be that of creativity and linguistic freedom. Perhaps the basic function of SEO Translation has to do with determining the appropriate keywords and incorporating them into your translation. For a translator, this calls for the substitution of linguistically more appropriate words and phrases with the ones that “sell”. It’s somewhat similar with newspaper journalists being forced to use certain wordings or chunks of text in their articles, in order to side with the owner’s (usually questionable) interests.
The difference in the case of SEO Translation is that the Owner and the Journalist are the same person: the Translator. Does this dual function create a conflict of interests? Can you really combine Marketing and “Art”? One easy answer to this dilemma would be that SEO and Translation should never get married. In cinema terms, it’s like Sylvester Stalone marrying Sandra Bullock or a walking and talking killing machine marrying America’s sweetheart. Who wants to see that? (I DO!) According to this train of thought, SEO should remain in the hands of big internet marketing firms and translation in the hands of translators.
Unfortunately this would make more sense twenty years ago. During the current economic crisis, companies impose painful horizontal cutbacks and, as always, professional business services are the ones suffering more. For translators that do not have easy direct access to end clients, this means a severely decreased income. For this reason, freelancers are required to add more services to their portfolio and provide an integrated service to potential new clients. SEO is a service that translators can (potentially) master and it has been on the borders of the localization process for years. Liquidity and other financial problems have led businesses to seek for “one stop shops” and integrated solutions with reduced cost. For the localization industry this has made clear that localizing a website without taking SEO into account is of little use to the end client.
As for the issue of creativity, I believe that translators who are concerned about this do not really grasp the nature of the task. This is a combined marketing/translation task and has little to do with creativity…
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