Everyone thought I was nuts to take on the scriptwriting job a couple of years ago, doing gross revenue-training video for the European division of a major US car manufacturer.
"You write it in English so ze boys in Detroit can understand und okay it," said the German manufacturer on the phone to me. "Zen I shoot the video and do one edit. Zat's all zey vant to spend."
"Fine," I ventured. "So what's the catch?"
MARKETING OR FINANCE
"Zat one edit gets voiceovers in 11 different languages," he continued, sniggering a bit. "Ze translations are all different lengths. So your original has to work in chunks mit long gaps in English, so it can flow at 90 miles an hour in Greek.
"It's a bloody nightmare," he said finally. "Still vant to do it?"
I let out a long sigh, stared at my sparse-looking bank statement and said yes.
Here, then, is some advice supported my painful experience.
Allow for different language lengths
Strictly speaking, this is more of a design issue. But as we saw, it can affect the words, too.
If you intend to use the same visual guide for more than one language version, ensure that your design allows for differing amounts of text (or oral speech.)
Bear in mind that English is the just about the shortest of the world's commercial languages. So if your text is a tight concord English, you'll be way over length in many other languages. You need up to threefold as much space for some of them. So keep your English version short and sweet.
If truth is essential, use the last common denominators
Sadly, figurative speech doesn't translate. However, translators valiantly attempt to do it, often with regrettably amusing results.
Here's an example from an clause of mine that appears on the US marketing website, MarketingProfs.com - "How To Write Right To Your Customers' Hearts." My original paragraph:
"Probably the most important part of acquiring your writing right is to really know what makes your clients (or any other audience) tick. Customer analysis techniques are great for acquiring hard facts and data. But if you want to write so you touch their hearts, you need to back up the formal information with someaffair a bit more emotional."
The Spanish translation that appeared on a South American Web site:
"Probablemente la parte m importante de escribir bien es saber realmente que es lo que a sus clientes (o cualquier otra audiencia) les llama la atenci. Las tnicas de anisis de clientes son buenas para poder obtener hechos e informaci. Pero si quiere escribir para llegar muy cerca de su coraz, usted necesita respaldar la informaci formal con algo emocional."
How Google translated it back into English:
"Probablemente the part most important to write or is to really know that is what to his clients (or any other hearing) it calls the attention to them. The techniques of analysis of clients are good to be able to obtain facts and information. But if he wants to write to arrive closely together from his heart, you need to endorse the formal information with someaffair emocional."
Phew. Lucky it wasn't operational in operation instructions for open heart surgery. Had I been writing my piece for multiplex languages, I would have written it like this, with simple phrase structure and all figurative speech stripped out:
"To write effectively, it is most important that the author knows the clients (or any other group you're writing for) very well, and understands how they think. It's possible to get useful facts and information from client analysis techniques. However, if the author wants to appeal to clients emotionally, emotional writing must be added to the formal information."
Boring, isn't it? But it wouldn't be open to quite so many misunderstandings.
Yes, misunderstandings can be funny. But in a marketing or gross revenue context, they can be costly, too.
Be aware of how other languages work
You notice in the paragraphs above that I've removed my beloved "you" in favou of of "the author." This is especially important if you're writing for languages like Spanish or Portuguese, where often they don't talk to "you," but to the third person.
I believe that's why affairs went wrong with the translation of that clause on the South American Web site. The translators haven't been able to lick that "he" and "you" are the same person.
Try as far as you can to organize your grammar and phrase structure in the English version so that they're as simple as possible. That makes it easier for translators to door latch on right.
We've all detected the jokes about embarrassing translations in the marcom arena - e.g., the following altered from a list of purportedly true stories:
* The Dairy Association's huge winner with the campaign "Got Milk?" prompted it to expand advertising to Mexico. Unfortunately, the Spanish translation read, "Are you lactating?"
* Scandinavian vacuum manufacturer Electrolux used the following in an American campaign: "Noaffair sucks like Electrolux."
* Clairol introduced the "Mist Stick," a curling iron, into Germany only to find out that "mist" is slang for muck. Not too many people had a use for the muck stick.
* Colgate introduced a toothpaste in France called Cue, the name of a ill-famed smu magazine.
* Coors put its catchword "Turn it loose" into Spanish, and it was taken as "Suffer from diarrhea."
And so on. Whether these are true is debatable. But the awful affair is, they could happen for real. And if I were responsible a hefty international marketing or ad budget, examples such as these would wipe the smiling right off my face.
Ad Copy and Brand Names: Only By the Experts, Please
There are some lessons to learn here about writing for stigmatisation and ad copy in multiplex languages:
1. Get the preparation and background research done by marcom experts in every language market you're going to. One Spanish-speaking country will remonstrate and interpretations that are different from another. Brazilian Portuguese is different from the Portuguese in Portugal. Parisian French is slightly different from Belgian French and Swiss French and Quois French. And that's before we even bestir oneself on languages in the Middle East, Africa, Asia and beyond.
2. Make sure that your translations are done not just by translation experts in each language but by translation experts who understand how to write ad copy. Insist on this when you hire the translation agency. They may think it's OK to use a native-speaker diary custodian or other professional author who isn't a trained copyauthor. That's not good if you want to get bang for your buck in the foreign ad spend.
3. It's impossible to judge the quality of translations into languages you don't speak, so get them double-checked by an appropriate native speaker. Don't leave it to the translation agency; play it safe. Preferably, get a native-speaker copyauthor (perhaps from the local ad agency?) to run through it and tighten it up if necessary.
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