To translate – or not?
February 26th, 2010
When an estate agent enters property details on Kyero.com, we automatically translate the main property features – such as price and floor area – and present the property in a number of languages.
Currently, every property advertised on Kyero.com is translated into Danish, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, Russian.
In addition, properties entered in Spanish are translated to English – and vice verse.
What this means is that estate agents can receive enquiries from potential buyers in a language they can’t understand.
Generally, our suggestion in these situations is to :
1. Use google translate to get a sense of the enquiry – and reply in whatever languages you are comfortable in.
2. Reply to the enquiry asking them if they speak any of your languages
3. Pass the enquiry along to a colleague who can communicate in that language
Is that realistic & practical? Would you prefer to receive enquiries only in the languages you can routinely handle?
I started this post because of the first comment below from an estate agent. What do you think?
Martin Dell, Kyero.com
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Hi,
one suggestion from an advertiser: please let’s do away with machine translations. I’m an agent and I can communicate in four languages but I do not speak Russian, Danish or Italian. Nevertheless, I keep getting enquiries in these languages because Kyero offers its portal in nine languages and auto-translates the adverts into the language the visitor has selected. This is complete nonsense. I cannot sell a house to someone with whom I cannot communicate. Kyero should publish the adverts only in the language that the agent has chosen, i.e. a Russian visitor who has selected Russian as the portal language should see my advert in English, Spanish or German. I do not want to get mails in Russian because my email client cannot decipher cyrillic and I don’t speak the language. PLEASE!
Hi Martin,
I would prefer to keep the translations. In English & Spanish I obviously reply in those languages. In other languages that I do not know I reply in English and I find that sometimes they do speak the language and we go from there. If they don’t understand English all I’ve wasted is a little time on an email. If we lost the translations we’d lose these opportunities. I like the fact I only have to write a long description in one language, a real time saver.
I think I’d prefer to keep the translations. I can answer emails in English, Spanish and Catalan. But for French enquiries for example, I use a standard enquiry reply that lets clients know I can read their emails, but that I will answer in one of my 3 languages. I tell them that if they come out to view I will have an interpreter accompany us. It works quite well for me. In my experience many clients searching in Russian, Danish, Italian etc can communicate quite effectively in other languages. Jeff Greensmith, http://www.fincasdirect.com, Tarragona
It seems there’s a couple of options here:
1. We could only display properties in the languages that each agent explicitly sets
2. We could autotranslate enquiries as they are sent to an agent
Any preferences or other suggestions?
Autotranslations are – in most cases – rubbish. The mails I received from a Russian client who used an online translation tool to communicate did not make any sense to me, neither in English nor in German.
I doubt that autotranslated ads will ever result in a sale and to me that’s the only thing that counts. Anything else is just added workload.
Just my two cents worth.