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We’ve all heard amusing horror stories about companies whose marketing campaigns went terribly wrong due to bad translations. For instance, Pepsi’s slogan “Come alive with the Pepsi Generation” was interpreted in Taiwan as “Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead”. Another prime example is American Airline’s “Fly in leather” tagline, which, when translated literally for the Mexican market, invited passengers to fly in the nude. These tremendous oversights, while entertaining, have the effect increasing the cultural awareness in businesses around the world. Errors such as these, coupled with increasing numbers of non-English speaking web users, have led many companies to adopt a strategy of “localization” when it comes to presenting themselves in the global marketplace through the web. More than simply careful, appropriate translations, localization refers to an adaptation of language, content and design to reflect local cultural sensitivities as a whole.

Since web sites are increasingly the lens through which a company is viewed, web designers are considering more than just literal translations in order to increase their positive image and presence in overseas markets. More and more, the trend is to consider numerous factors of cultural significance when creating a web site. Consider funneling customers to tailored sites based on their cultural identifications; you can ask users to select their home country before entering the site, for example. Formatting for date and time, representations of numbers, currency symbols, the tone of content, and even color is important to putting the best foot forward. For example, during a 1994 campaign, the telecom company Orange changed its approach when running ads in Northern Ireland. Their slogan, “The future’s bright…the future’s Orange,” was inappropriate because the color orange, associated with the Orange Order, a Protestant militant group, would alienate a large group in the target market. Similarly, an overly casual message, anglicized numerical values, even non-metric specs to describe a product, can be a turn-off to a potential customer with different cultural expectations.

Localization can be accomplished by careful research in your design. Many companies are using anthropological consultants to give them the edge over their competitors. Experts with vast bases of knowledge can interpret cultural symbols and push you in the right direction. When crafting your message, be sure to use translators and writers who are sensitive to the cultural complexities of the target audience. Not all Spanish dialects are created equal: a perfectly inane term in Argentina could have a foul meaning in Puerto Rico. Local literacy levels in Spain may be quite different from those in Ecuador, and different terminology should be considered. Use a translator who speaks the local dialect of your audience.

Many times, companies try to bypass errors in translation by using non-textual means of communication, but local trends must be considered in this circumstance as well. Tide detergent created a word-free billboard with three drawings. The leftmost showed a woman frowning and examining a dirty shirt. The second showed her loading the shirt into a washing machine and adding Tide. The furthest right frame showed her happily holding up the now-clean shirt. Many of you have spotted the problem with this ad: some languages, including Arabic and Hebrew, are read from right to left, which makes Tide a very unattractive product indeed. Carefully researching your intended audience’s habits and needs can prevent your customer from misunderstanding your message.

Just as you would consider keywords for optimizing your search engine results in English, this must also be a priority when developing a localization strategy. Your translator should use the correct language encoding to ensure that text in other alphabets and configurations will display properly. This is essential for languages using non-Roman alphabets, where the text will need to be reorganized for ease of reading. If the language is encoded incorrectly, users will have difficulty viewing your site and search engines may not be able to categorize it. For example, if your site is encoded correctly in Korean, a search engine might deem it more relevant to a user who performed a search in Korean than a similar site encoded in English. However, if the encoding is incorrect, you have lost this basic advantage over your competition. And, as always, use the most accurate local term for your product and services, not an exact translation.

Businesses are increasingly competing on a global level, and the internet is the staging ground for launching a product to an international market. Considering local customs, culture, and needs is the key to reaching a global audience without looking foolish. Steer away from literal translations, and don’t make assumptions about your audience without first doing the proper research. If successfully done, your web site will positively reflect the image of your company abroad. One last example: Coca-Cola, after careful research of over 40,000 Chinese characters phonetically similar to their product name, hit upon a winner. The characters they chose roughly translate as “happiness in the mouth”.

Friday, October 19th, 2007 Both comments and pings are currently closed.

By Haley January Eckels