Clothing industry translations – how we built our team and gained experience

Clothing industry translations are seemingly easy. An amateur might ask, “What’s so difficult about fashion?” But an expert will answer, “Everything,” meaning various cuts, fabrics and trends that are only the tip of the fashion iceberg. At locatheart, we work only with true experts. We know that building up a professional team takes quite a while. In this article, we discuss our introduction to garment industry translations and the formation of our dream team.

The locatheart translation agency has many years of clothing and shoe industry experience under its belt. But it hasn’t always been like this. When starting out, we created various content for only five East European markets. We found trustworthy translators there with whom we worked on a regular basis.

The ever-increasing number of new translation projects we were involved with proved that our team did very well with fashion-related texts. This gave us a huge opportunity for growth. By working with professional translators and a great team of editors, we could expand our business into more markets and take on the enormous challenge that is the clothing industry. Being part of major international projects related to the world of fashion has allowed us to gain a massive amount of valuable experience.

Step by step, we learned how to analyse each market so that we could meet the most demanding business, marketing – and last but not least – client requirements.

Nowadays, we regularly produce clothing industry translations for a dozen of markets. We translate content for some of the most notable brands. We got here because of our experience and thoroughly done translations. One of the foundations of locatheart is our professional team of linguists.

We know how to look for the most qualified translators. We’re always on the lookout for new members to join our team of experts, while keeping in mind that each person’s skills need to meet our standards.

We work with a permanent team of language experts – some of whom work in our office. The rest are competent freelancers who have been collaborating with us for a few years now.

We care to maintain strong relationships with both translators and editors, which makes for long-lasting collaborations. Effective communication and keeping up with deadlines (of projects and payments) is the first big step toward building trust.

We create knowledge bases and use contemporary tools, thanks to which we’re able to maintain a high quality of our translations, keep up with the current trends and take on bigger and more complex projects.

Even at the beginning of our collaboration, top quality is extremely important to us. We work only with people who present the highest level of language skills.

The graphic below shows our recruitment process for professional translators:

Translation quality is checked with every project, even after we’ve initiated a collaboration.

Translations are also about work coordination and the flow of information. The second foundation of our agency is project managers with experience in translations for the fashion industry (clothing and shoe sectors). As they know the specifics of a given industry, they’re able to efficiently identify problems and bottlenecks, as well as manage resources (e.g. dictionaries and guidelines). But above all, they understand the very specific needs of each customer – for instance, keeping up with the contemporary clothing terminology.

Our project management team has evolved right alongside our company. Over the years, we’ve implemented and perfected translation procedures, collected the most essential tools, and expanded our database. All of this has allowed us to take on new, exciting challenges.

In the years 2020—2021, we’ve considerably expanded the range of our services. To take on the challenges of e-commerce and digital marketing in the best way possible, we’ve appointed a team of SEO experts who:

• provide keywords necessary to create marketing texts in various languages,
• help optimise existing content,
• audit e-commerce websites.

Our project managers have also broadened their knowledge of SEO. As a result, they’re able to advise clients on when it’s worth using our SEO and keyword identification services.

With the start of a new decade, the clothing industry is facing huge challenges. Changes in production and delivery processes must be followed by appropriate communication. We’re constantly increasing our skills in this area.

• We can formulate content in such a way that the client won’t be accused of greenwashing.
• We keep up with new trends, production technologies, and materials (digital fashion, vegan leather alternatives, recycled and upcycled fabrics, etc.).
• We look for ways to localize industry-specific English borrowings. Texts targeted at individual clients shouldn’t be packed with jargon.

We’re continually broadening our knowledge of multilingual communication in the clothing industry. We share insights within our team, and also on our blog. Feel free to browse through our texts about:

• omnichannel communication (in the context of fashion brands),
• tricky nomenclature of Japanese fashion.

Our specialised team that’s constantly growing is ready to meet all your requirements. We’re adding to and systematising our knowledge to always be able to provide expert help. Sounds like something for you? We’re waiting for your project.