Translations Requirements for Product Labels

When you are expanding into Europe, there comes the time where you inevitably need to translate your products, but to what extent needs to be done to be not only successful but also remain compliant.

The first step is obviously that your listings need to be translated, we have talked about that in the past, Amazon will auto-translate your listings into the marketplace country language where the customer resides within their browser. However, this only affects the language at a browser level to be understood by the viewer, you will need to manually translate the listing to benefit from the SEO and search ranking within that marketplace as English titles, keywords, etc will make no sense to someone on Amazon Spain for example as they would search for products in Spanish. As such you need to make sure all your listing product detail page content is translated to each of the European marketplaces, even if that is just Google Translate at the very least. The same needs to be done to the backend search terms and keywords of these listings too, however, it is important to consider that a direct translation of an English keyword may not be a keyword in another language as cultures differ. Therefore, it is probably worth having some keyword research in those languages done, to maximize the opportunities for you.

Now that we have covered the translation of product listings, it is time to discuss the physical product packaging and label. Now there are two sides of product label compliance – the first is ensuring that the content is legally compliant, what regulations does your product fall under, what ingredients are in your product that may be compliant and may not be compliant, are there any claims you need to substantiate and what might you need to change on that label to make it compliant. We have talked about that at some length previously here. However, the second side and highlight for today is the translation of that legally compliant packaging and label content.

When you are fulfilling from a certain country, those products need to be translated in that country. Basically, what is happening is when you are shipping your through on the PAN-EU Program, for example, then your product listings, your product packaging, should all be translated, because the people that are in those countries want to see the product in their native tongue, the instructions need to be translated.

So, if you have got something on your label such as ingredients, how often it can be taken, the daily dosage. It is everything from a health and safety point of view, how to use instructions – that all needs to be written in the marketplace language the product is sold in.

Now, if you think about Amazon, what languages are needed to be translated into, we have got the UK (which while it is still English does have some differentiation from American English) Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Holland, Poland, and Sweden. So, you are going to need your products translated into all those languages.

Then there comes the issue of if your product is translated into Spanish for example, it is then only applicable for sale in Spain due to being exclusively in that language. This can be a pain for when you might need to remove some stock and move some units to other marketplaces to help bolster low inventory for example. That stock is then useless in the UK and elsewhere in the EU. In that case, peel and reveal stickers are a perfect solution for this as they allow for manufacturers to print a large amount of information, on to a label where space is limited. This works by having the top layer peeled back to access additional areas of the label. Peel and reveal labels can be multi-layered giving freedom to product suppliers to include more than one language for the information. This then circumvents the above issue as it allows for the products with these kind of stickers to be stored and fulfilled in any marketplace as every language is available on the label.

It is straightforward and dependent on your products is going to decide on whether that is an insert, whether it is a peel off label, whether that’s instructions all on one label, there is lots and lots of different things that you can do to make that happen. But we are trying to say is your product needs translation. You must get that product translated, the listings, the keywords, and the product packaging. If you need help with that at any level, whether it is the product detail pages or the labelling we have a team of native tongue translators who you can utilise to ensure your products are not only reads as it should in the EU for locals in a search related perspective but also Amazon EU compliance.