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Global marketing and international marketing aren't the same thing, even though many marketers treat them the same way, as I witness every day.

The translation business is not all champagne and private jets, my friends. All right, I don’t suppose any of you imagined it was, but it’s a little joke I like to use. It is true, though, that translation work never stops being a challenge. You might think that after years of experience translation becomes rote and simple – after all, when you’ve translated everything, you just plug in your previous work and you’re done, right? The fact is, every document needs to be handled as a unique piece of human thought, and even if the concepts are familiar, very often you will encounter new words, even after decades of experience. Here are a few my colleagues and I have noted – words with deep and often non-obvious meanings that have challenged the best translators in the world.

We have a tendency to oversimplify the act of communication and assume it is all just words. But communication goes so much deeper: there is the tone, the body language, the facial expression, the volume, the context. One of the reasons people are so easily offended on the Internet and in email is because everything but the words is stripped away, and we must supply our own tone, context, and imagined body language.

Computer Aided Translation (CAT) tools are no longer strange or undesirable. In fact, almost any translation professional you talk to uses them just about 100% of the time, and they’re no longer really controversial.

Currently there are 35 known indigenous languages in Argentina of which only 13 of these are officially listed. These include – Mapuche, Tehuelche, Quichua Santiagueño, Mocoví, Nivaclé, Toba, Ava-Chiriguano, Pilagá, Guaraní, Wichí, Mbya, and Chorote.

A few decades ago, travelling overseas or communicating with people who speak a different language was not part of everyday life. Today though, countries and communities around the world are becoming more connected. Travel is more affordable and accessible, and businesses and operating on a global scale, irrespective of how large they are.