September 2006

By Huiping ILER

Cultural blunders are funny to us, but not to businesses who spend big bucks marketing their products worldwide. How can you learn from their red faces? Read on.

Did you know that in Germany latte means erection? If you are Starbucks you better know. And if you are Rolls Royce you better know that mist means manure in German, especially since one of your cars is named the Silver Mist. What if your specialty is baby food? Stay away from France if your name is Gerber: it’s a French word for vomiting.

Although some of these translations might seem funny to us, they can be a nightmare to companies reaching out to a global audience. After all, the last thing you want to do as a business is be the laughing stock of your potential customers. Even worse? Offend them and have them shun you. This is precisely what happened to U.S. retail giant Nike.

Muslim customers in the Middle East boycotted Nike after it launched a shoe in the mid-nineties with a symbol that was supposed to suggest a flame. To Muslims, the design suggested Arabic script for Allah. Placing Allah close to the sole of the foot, a part of the body considered unclean in that culture, was a form of blasphemy. As a result Muslims boycotted Nike until they made amends.

If these cultural blunders can happen to super-sized corporations like Nike, what about the little guys? Needless to say, one has only to go as far as their mouse to discover that Lost in Translation is not just a great movie starring Bill Murray. Multilingual websites are rampant with mistakes and cultural gaffes. And many companies don’t even know just how lost in translation they are.

The nuances of translation are far-ranging. A literal word in one language, for example, may have no equivalent in another language, or could have a completely different "meaning" or effect in the translated language. A great translation is one that finds true equivalence – linguistically, conceptually and culturally.

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