Getting It Right — Sounding Polished in a Second Language
To a certain point, it’s comical. We all had a good laugh when we heard that Pepsi’s “Come Alive With The Pepsi Generation” slogan translated into Chinese as “Pepsi Brings Your Ancestors Back From The Grave”. We know that many words, phrases and idioms don’t translate well. This is part of life and hopefully we can see the humorous side of it. But if it’s your company, and your carefully crafted marketing material, it’s not a laughing matter. At best, an error in translation might be written off as poorly worded by your potential clients. At worst, it may portray your company as out of touch, low-budget, or even downright offensive. In the world of global marketing and internatio-
nal business, how can you communicate well with your target market, and not end up spending your precious marketing dollars on something that will alienate the ones you are trying to attract? 1. Keep It Simple In your native tongue, idioms, figures of speech and complicated sentence structure can add variety and depth of meaning to your message. But they are a translator’s worst enemy. Instead of “we bring you the best of what the industry has to offer, hands down”, try something simpler like “We offer you the best quality in the industry”. 2. Cubits, Bushels or Yen? Nothing says oblivious like using units that your audience is not familiar with. If you grew up on the metric system but advertise to US readers, change your measurements from cubic meters to cubic feet. If you grew up with the Impe-
rial system, don’t force pounds and inches on your customers in Latin America. Do the conversions before publishing, and never make your readers do the math themselves. 3. Don’t Trust Google While it is a great tool for individual words and short phrases, free software that attempts to translate large amounts of text is often seriously flawed, and your clients will absolutely notice that something ain’t proper. Have a fluent speaker proofread your text. And while it doesn’t have to be perfect, it should be representative of your organization’s quality. 4. The Name Game Typically, if you are a king or queen, your name will be translated (e.g. Queen Elizabeth becomes La Reina Isabel in Spanish). However if you’re just a President, your name is generally left alone (e.g. George Bush does not become Jorge Bush). For the rest of us, we’re just glad to be mentioned at all.
THANK YOU FOR READING Like life, the Travel and Hospitality Industry seems to move at the speed of light. As a committed B2B partner, we aim to help you keep up with the latest industry news and opportunities. CommuniQuest magazine is a valuable tool that brings you the timely information and analysis that you need, with a flair for what's hot, relevant and interesting. As we work together on group travel projects throughout the region, I wish you and your colleagues the best of success in fulfilling your quest, whatever it may be. Jose Manuel Garcia Visionary, Founder and Managing Commander-in-Chief IVI DMC² 14
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