My German colleague Martin sent me an email stating that “wurst case, we have to think of lowering margin”. For those of you who don’t speak German, “Wurst” means sausage and has nothing to do with the English word “worst”. The same week another Danish colleague invited the office to “drinks and nipples“.
We were neither about to lower any sausage margins nor were we about to have breast milk for drinks. But the above examples support the key message in this article: don’t underestimate the power of semantics, cultural associations and localized copy writing when chosing to globalize your online business.
I would argue that in globalizing your copy writing (merchandising, point of sales statements etc) via a translation agency, you are forfeiting the most important tool you have to convince your customer to buy your products.
The companies that do the translating would of course argue that it is a matter of quality of translation (the below example would have been easy to translate).
Nevertheless, I cannot see how a creative copy, sometimes based on a functional area of understanding (e.g. computers), with all its cultural bias, can be translated to have the same meaning and sought after sales impact.
Find below a point of sale statement intended to be used in all merchandising for a specific laptop computer that I reviewed this week.
I sincerely hope you can have a laugh at the English wording “90% power. 90% power-trip”, carelessly translated into a selection of your mother tongues.
The Swedish translation of “power-trip” is “högvilt”. The latter is a word for a group of Swedish wild animals (e.g. deer) for which Swedish hunters by law need to use the most heavy type of ammunition.
So why do companies continue to expand these global practices?
Copy text is similar to many quality metrics in that it is difficult to isolate the direct impact on sales and customer experience. And that makes it an easy target for corporate cost cutters, opex scalers and Myers-Briggs profiles with a preference for sensing.
My advice for those of you thinking of outsourcing your “mother’s tongue” is to use your intuition and look at it this way: would you feel comfortable going to a job interview in a language you did not speak with an interpret by your side?
