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Great news! Your brand is considering international expansion, and your group has been selected to lead go-to-market strategies in new territories around the world. Now Job One is to make sure all of your product’s branded materials and content are ready to reach new audiences speaking different languages. Nothing a quick call to a translation service couldn’t fix. What could go wrong?
As it turns out, plenty. Translation is just a single stage—albeit an important and resource-intensive one—of the content localization process. Marketing globalization goes beyond assuring your brand’s words are translated correctly to encompass cultural factors that shape-shift not just across borders, but often within them as well.
Here are several layers of localization you should consider to create a more efficient approach to transforming your marketing material for multilingual audiences:
This is the starting point for most marketers when they assess their content’s localization. After all, they are the world’s top authority on the use and abuse of their own brand. Along with their designers and advertising agencies, marketers should be able to easily assess whether their materials meet brand guidelines, the accompanying visuals are brand-compliant, the logo is being used correctly and other brand guidelines. A well-orchestrated review process at both the headquarters and country/regional levels is compulsory for protecting your brand as it bravely expands into new worlds.
Even when everything is spelled correctly, the translation may not mean what it seems to say. Unintentional translation errors are both legion and legendary among international marketers.
Here’s a fantastic example. Parker Pen intended to run ads in Mexico with the tag line, “It won’t leak in your pocket and embarrass you.” The translation, unfortunately, still created some red faces: “It won’t leak in your pocket and make you pregnant.” How the heck did that happen? It turned out that a non-native Spanish employee who reviewed the translation thought that embarazar (understandably) means “to embarrass” rather than “to impregnate.” Oops.
If you think that’s bad, pity the poor KFC marketing exec in charge of entering the Chinese market who didn’t realize that “Finger lickin’ good” was translated to the equivalent of “Eat your fingers off!”
Translated copy that’s technically accurate won’t get the results you want if it still feels foreign to the local target audience. To use an English-language example, a British car manufacturer referring to boots, bonnets, cubby boxes, and dampers in its sales and marketing materials would leave United States readers scratching their heads. Even those who happen to understand Brit-slang for trunk, hood, glove compartments and shock absorbers will instantly understand that the manufacturer is sadly out of touch with the U.S. market. Same language—nearly incomprehensible.
Subtle shades of meaning are also found within markets. Again looking to China, even casual tourists will know that word choices can be quite different from Taiwan to Hong Kong to Beijing. Even in countries where the politics and cultures are more unified, there are subtle regional variations in word usage, for example between Tokyo and Kyoto or Paris and Bretagne.
We even live with message-challenging regional differences even here in the U.S. Someone growing up on the East Coast calls sandwiches on long rolls ‘grinders.’ Here on the West Coast where I’m from, you’d get some pretty strange looks if you asked for anything other than a ‘sub.’ And forget about asking for a ‘Hoagie’! (Be sure to check out UNC Professor Joshua Katz’s Dialect Survey Maps for more examples.)
Adopting Local Conventions
Beyond simple words on the page, marketers must assure that the behaviors depicted in their materials are desirable and culturally appropriate. After all, marketing is about aspirations. Make sure that your audience actually wants what your selling!
Even companies as globally savvy as P&G can get caught with their pants down when they fail to make local knowledge a part of the marketing localization process. The world’s top consumer goods marketer ported a TV commercial created for the European market depicting a woman bathing and her husband casually entering the room. While completely casual and normal—even a sign of love—in France or Germany, viewers in Japan saw inappropriate behavior and an invasion of privacy.
Localizing marketing content is a quick route to low-hanging revenue for companies that have market potential oversees. Fortune 500 companies that stepped up translation budgets were 1.5 times more likely than their peers to report revenue growth. But it’s crucial to remember that translation is much more than converting words and hunting down typos. Just like a dinner invitation, going after opportunities in new territories means being a good guest. For marketers, that means checking your own assumptions at the door and minding local cultural mores in all of your materials.
. As an expert in the translation and localization industry, Meinhardt excels at helping companies go global by streamlining their marketing globalization strategy. Prior to co-founding Cloudwords, Meinhardt worked with organizations across various industries to localize their product, marketing and training materials, and advised enterprise customers regarding their global translation strategy. LinkedIn: Michael Meinhardt Twitter: @m_meinhardt
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