Translated Ads Can Miss The Point

The Wall Street Journal - September 18, 2003

Message to marketers: One man's calzones may be another man's underwear.

That is a lesson at least one purveyor of the cheese and meat-filled turnovers probably would like to have known before trying to market them to Spanish speakers.

Calzone means underwear in Spanish.

The poor translation was one example on a list of botched advertising and branding efforts cited in a recent national survey of people who speak English as a second language.

Though often humorous, such blunders could be costing companies millions of dollars in lost sales from customers who are either perturbed or confused by the poor translations, the survey suggested.

Of the 513 people surveyed by New York-based translation service TransPerfect Translations Inc., 57% have spotted advertising that is incorrectly translated from English into other languages.

Close to 50% simply tune out the message of an ad if it is poorly translated. About 65% said bad translations show a lack of caring about the consumer, while nearly a third said it would hinder their loyalty to a product.

"It makes a lot of people feel negatively about a product," Said Liz Elting, cofounder of TransPerfect Translations.

"[Another] point that people made is that often the advertisements are unclear," she said.

Although 30% found some poor translations humorous, 36% misunderstood what the product was or what it was used for because of a bad translation.

One company, for example, trying to sell orange juice to Korean speakers, pitched it as "not too sour."

Respondents were offended by some advertising slip-ups, like the translation of "point" into Spanish as "puta," which means prostitute.

Even simple mistakes, such as advertising a store where everything costs a dollar as "Un Dollar," rather than the correct "Un Dolar" in Spanish, was enough to put off potential customers, the survey found.

Coca-Cola Co., Atlanta, had what was probably among the earliest translation gaffes for a global brand. The beverage company ran into trouble in the 1920's when shopkeepers in China tried to come up with characters that sounded like Coke.

Depending on the dialect, the literal translations ranged from "bite the wax tadpole" to "female horse stuffed with wax."

The company rectified the problem by launching a contest to come up with the best translation. Coke settled on "happiness in the mouth," a pitch by a professor from Shanghai.

Coca-Cola, which registered the name as a Chinese trademark, said it generally has managed to avoid translation errors over the years by allowing local units of the company to do their own advertising, rather than trying to translate campaigns globally.

The surging Hispanic market and the growth of other minority groups in the U.S., as well as the continuing globalization of corporate brands, make correct translations all the more important nowadays for U.S. companies.

Despite spending millions of dollars a year on advertising and branding, plenty of companies still lack savvy when it comes to pitching to nonnative speakers of English.

One of the most common mistakes companies make is assuming that because people speak another language they will be experts at translating ad copy into that language.

"What happens is companies ask in-house personnel who are fluent in a language to translate," TransPerfect's Ms. Elting said. "Or a large corporation might say, 'Let's just have Spain do it.' They might know the language but that doesn't mean they can translate a brand or ad campaign," she said.

U.S. milk processors managed to avoid that pitfall a few years ago when they wanted to launch a campaign to increase milk consumption among Hispanics in the U.S.

The Milk Processor Education Program quickly realized its catchy "Got Milk?" campaign wouldn't go down so well in Spanish. The slogan's literal translation was, "Are You Lactating?"

The group tapped Siboney USA, a Spanish-language advertising agency, to adapt the ads, eventually agreeing on "Mas Leche, Mas Logro." The slogan, which means, "More Milk, More Achievement," was specifically crafted to appeal to "Hispanic moms," said Victor Zaborsky, spokesman for the Milk Processor Education group in Washington.

Though many businesses are more sophisticated on the translation front than they were a decade ago, bad translations remain an issue.

"Companies still are not putting the money into foreign-language copy that they should be," Ms. Elting said. "They might allocate a year and spend millions on a campaign in the U.S., and maybe a week or two weeks and thousands of dollars on a foreign campaign."

Ads for food products are the worst offenders, according to 35% of respondents in the June survey, followed by drugs, 20%, baby products, 13% , and soda and beverages, 12%.

About 35% of respondents said newspaper ads were the most likely to have translation errors, while 31% pointed to television ads. Magazines were cited by 27%, billboards by 15% and radio by 12%.

"In order to succeed, translated ad copy must be crafted as if it were originally written in the target language," Ms. Elting said.

"The best way to achieve that is to employ native speakers from the target country who have extensive professional experience in translating ad copy and marketing materials - or 'transadapting', as we often call it," she said.

"A thorough knowledge of the target culture, including the use of idiomatic expressions, allows the professional native speaker to communicate the meaning and the message as opposed to a literal rendering of the words," Ms. Elting said.

—Janet Whitman

About TransPerfect
With revenue of over $250 million, TransPerfect is the largest privately held language services provider in the world. From offices in 66 cities on 5 continents, TransPerfect offers a full range of services in over 100 languages to multinationals worldwide. With a global network of over 4,000 linguists and subject-area specialists, TransPerfect is the largest translation company to be fully ISO 9001:2008 and EN 15038:2006 certified. TransPerfect is headquartered in New York and has regional headquarters in London and Hong Kong. For more information, please visit our website at www.transperfect.com.