Lost In Translation: Language Blunders Can Sully Ad Efforts

Even Small Mistakes Can Cost Marketers Sales And Confidence; Want Fries With That Underwear?

The Wall Street Journal Europe - September 19, 2003

Message to marketers: One man's pizza may be another man's pants.

That is a lesson at least one U.S. advertiser would like to have known before trying to market his folded-over pizza, called a calzone, to Spanish speakers: To them, calzone means underwear. 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.

Of the 513 people surveyed, 57% said they had spotted advertising that was incorrectly translated from English into other languages. Though the blunders are often humorous, they can cost the advertiser sales, suggested the survey, conducted by New York based translation service TransPerfect Translations Inc. Close to 50% of respondents said they simply tune out the message if an ad is poorly translated, and about 65% interpret bad translations as evidence that the advertiser doesn't care about the consumer. Even small mistakes, such as advertising a store where everything costs a dollar as "Un Dollar," rather than the correct Spanish "Un Dolar," was enough to put off potential customers, the survey found.

"It makes a lot of people feel negatively about a product," Says Liz Elting, cofounder of TransPerfect Translations. Respondents were actually offended by some advertising slip-ups, like the translation of "point" into Spanish as "puta," which means prostitute.

Coca-Cola Co. had what was probably among the earliest translation gaffes for a global brand, running into trouble in the 1920s 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 Atlanta-based parent company remedied 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, says 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 continuing globalization of corporate brands makes correct translations all the more important nowadays for U.S. companies, as does the fast-growing Hispanic market in the U.S. itself.

When U.S. milk processors decided to take their successful "Got Milk" campaign to a Spanish-speaking audience, they managed to avoid the pit-falls that Coke had encountered decades earlier. Quickly realizing the catchy slogan wouldn't go down so well in Spanish - the literal translation means something like "Are you lactating?" - the Milk Processor Education Program tapped Siboney USA, a Spanish-language advertising agency, to do an adaptation of the campaign.

"In order to succeed, translated ad copy must be crafted as if it were originally written in the target language," says Ms. Elting of TransPerfect Translations. She recommends using native speakers, who know the culture, particularly idiomatic expressions, in order to get across the meaning of the message rather than just a literal rendering of it.

The message the milk processors and Siboney eventually settled on was "Mas Leche, Mas Logro." The slogan, which means, "More Milk, More Achievement," was specifically crafted to appeal to "Hispanic moms," says Victor Zaborsky, spokesman for the Milk Processor Education Group in Washington, D.C.

But clearly the degree of precision shown by the milk processors isn't yet the rule. "Companies still are not putting the money into foreign-language copy that they should be," Ms. Elting says. "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."

Of the respondents to the June survey, 35% thought advertisements for food products were the worst translation offenders, while 20% pointed to ads for pharmaceuticals, 13% ads for baby products and 12% ads for soda and other beverages. About 35% of respondents said that newspaper advertisements 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%.

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