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Business Ethics Gurus' Business is Booming
 It's a hot time to be a business ethics expert says the Atlanta Journal Constitution. One sign: the Atlanta for the Society for Business Ethics' annual conference workshops included their first-ever workshop for members on how to deal with the press. Other sessions included "Markets and Business Ethics," "The Corporation and Moral Agency" and one titled simply "Wal-Mart."
Need certified multilanguage translation of your company's Code of Ethics? Phone Sloan Friedman at SRF Global Translations.
Translation Issues Can Impact on Search Engine Placement
Search Engine Roundtable, reporting from Search Engine Strategies Latino, notes that translation issues can have impact on search optimization and sales. "Challenges, cultural aspects, different languages, different vocabulary, different user profiles, different web use habits and more. When preparing a campaign you need to understand all these items.
You should have different ad management styles for each country. Each country may have its own objective, which areas are a priority, so managing the results locally is important. A good report should support web site strategies definitions, should highlight user profile differences on each country, should bring up strategic information that may be used by marketing department even offline."
SRF Global Translations provides nuanced, certified, localized multilanguage translations of marketing and advertising materials for multinational companies.
Consider Piloting Blog-Based Marketing Campaigns in France. But Don't Let Your Message Get Lost in Translation
 Global marketers would be wise to pilot blog-based marketing campaigns in France because it's one of the most Internet-savvy countries on earth, says Eric Kintz of HP on his Marketing Excellence Blog. But don't let your message get lost in a bad machine translation, says Sloan Friedman, president of SRF Global Translations.
Continue reading "Consider Piloting Blog-Based Marketing Campaigns in France. But Don't Let Your Message Get Lost in Translation" »
SRF Global Translation Challenges and Corrects Google's Translation of Italian "Monitoring Your Brand" Blog Post As a Public Service to the Global Business Blogging Community
Yesterday, Steve Rubel at Micropersuasion spotlighted a post in Luca De Fino's Italian blog, Fluido, about how to monitor your brand online. Since the original was in Italian, he also linked to a Google translation of the post. It was complete gibberish, as machine translations so often are. Since every business needs to monitor its brand online, SRF Global Translations is providing a certified English translation (below) of the post and the comments it generated, created by a literate human as a public service to the global business blogging community.
Read the Google translation for a laugh. But think about how serious it could be if you used Google or BabelFish to translate something said about your company on the Internet. Every sentence in an incorrectly translated non-English blog post about your company could be a PR minefield, says Sloan Friedman, president of SRF Global Translations.
Here's SRF Global Translations' certified correct English translation of the Fluido post.
Continue reading "SRF Global Translation Challenges and Corrects Google's Translation of Italian "Monitoring Your Brand" Blog Post As a Public Service to the Global Business Blogging Community" »
Do You Want Poetry or Gobbledygook in Your Multilanguage Translations?
 What is plain language use in one language can become poetry – or gobbledygook - in another. Gossip, arrows, airplanes, and time can fly. But preferably not in the same sentence.
Advertising text relies heavily on ambiguities and metaphor, which need to be translated on two levels - linguistic and cultural. Humans excel at sorting through ambiguities in their own language to get to what the writer intended to say. Machine translation software simply can’t do that.
Meaning depends on context
The computer is supposed to "understand" what the source text means, and computers have never been good at this, maybe for the simple reason that nobody really knows what understanding is.
Meaning often depends on context. If we come across a sentence such as Time flies like an arrow in a soap opera or during a philosophical debate, we wouldn't hesitate to construe it as a statement about the nature of time.
The same sentence, when uttered in a science fiction movie about entities called time flies -- a type of fly that flies across time -- would become a statement about what these time flies like (they just happen to like arrows).
Continue reading "Do You Want Poetry or Gobbledygook in Your Multilanguage Translations?" »
The Pregnant Nun and Other False Cognate Translations
 High school Spanish teachers amuse their students with the story of a hapless American nun, who addressed a Spanish-speaking audience with the words: "Estoy embarazada…"? In Spanish, this innocent expression means "I am pregnant”, which certainly wasn’t what the speaker wanted to convey.
The countless word pairs in related languages with similar form but different meaning, such as the English/Spanish "embarrassed/embarazada", are called "false cognates". They represent a huge challenge not only to Spanish teachers, but also to businesses that must communicate clearly.
Continue reading "The Pregnant Nun and Other False Cognate Translations" »
Japanese Have Fun With Engrish
 SRF Global Translations' translators of Japanese see a certain amount of playfulness, that we in the West seem to have lost, in how the Japanese deal with language, especially foreign language. The website www.engrish.com contains a wealth of funny instances of English called to serve in Japanese advertising, with products that target the locals. "Engrish," says the site, "can be simply defined as the humorous English mistakes that appear in Japanese advertising and product design."
Does calling a brand of moist tissues "My Wet" mean that advertisers and marketing specialists in Japan have chosen to ignore the importance of accurate, and culturally sensitive translation? Of course not.
Japanese Text: Ornamentation, Not Information Sells Better
Anyone who has studied the phenomenon will explain that many Japanese marketeers use English text as an element of design, not to convey information. Apparently, merchandise packaging that displays strange alphabetic pictures on it sells better with the Japanese public.
Continue reading "Japanese Have Fun With Engrish" »
Translation Tip from SRF Global Translations
At any conference these days, you're likely to meet participants from Japan, China, India, and several other countries.
Expand your global marketing opportunities by having your conference presentations translated in advance so you can provide your Power Point and notes in the languages of the conference participants.
If you're a presenter, ask the conference organizers to tell you the countries of origin of registrants and then submit your Power Point and handouts in those languages.
SRF Global Translations Demonstrates the Difference Between Machine and Human Translations
 What's the difference between a machine translation by AltaVista's BabelFish or Google Language Tools and a nuanced, professional translation by a literate human at SRF Global Translations? Here's a demonstration.
Machine translations can be quite a hoot. Unless you are depending on them in business. "Misled ladies and horsemen of marketing:" began the advice in the BabelFish translation (to English) of a blog post -- written in Spanish -- by Andres Bianciotto, manager of Area6, Mexico, on his blog, Verborragia, about the recent Chevy Apprentice make-your-own-commercial contest.
Here's Bianciotto's original post, in Spanish:
Chevrolet lanzo una campana al estilo "publicidad 2.0" donde publico en linea una serie de elementos (musica, secuencias de video, imagenes, etc) para que cualquier persona pudiera componer un anuncio sobre la nueva Chevy Tahoe y ganar una pila de premios.
Esta bueno, si esto se hacia bien, Chevrolet podria aprender mucho de como sus clientes (o cualquier individuo interesado en hacerse con los premios) veian y expresaban las caracteristicas del producto.
Lo malo, es que la gente esta produciendo anuncios TAN contrarios, que ahora en GM lloran y los borran.
Despistadas damas y caballeros de marketing y publicidad de GM: no se trata de "dejar que la red forme el mensaje, del que despues nos aduenamos", se trata de hacer un producto u ofrecer un servicio f*&#ing amazing. Asi si uno deja que la gente disene los anuncios.
Mientras eso no ocurra, hagan un anuncio, compren TV y revistas, y taladren el "mensaje" a la gente en la cabeza a fuerza de repeticiones, no de dialogo.
Here's the nuanced, certified translation created by a literate human at SRF Global Translations:
Chevrolet launched a campaign in the style of "Web 2.0", by publishing a series of items online (music, video clips, images), so that anyone could compose a commercial on the new Chevy Tahoe and have a chance of winning from a large pool of prizes.
Well, had this been done properly, Chevrolet could have learned a lot about how its clients (or anyone interested in getting a prize) see and feel about the features of their product.
The problem is that people are coming up with commercials SO hostile, that now people in GM are crying over the feedback and deleting it.
Here's Google's automatic translation:
Chevrolet sent to a campaign to the style "publicity 2,0" where it published a series of elements in line (music, sequences of video, images, etc) so that any person could compose an announcement on the new Chevy Tahoe and gain a battery of prizes.
It is good, if this became or, Chevrolet could learn much of how their clients (or any individual interested in taking control of the prizes) saw and expressed the characteristics of the product. The bad thing, is that people are producing SO opposite announcements, that now in GM they cry and they erase them.
Confused ladies and horsemen of marketing and publicity of GM: one is not "to leave network it forms the message, which later we appropriated ourselves", is to make a product or to offer a service f*&# amazing. Thus yes one leaves people it designs the announcements. While that does not happen, they make an announcement, they buy TV and magazines, and they drill the "message" to people in the head by force of repetitions, not of dialogue."
Here (he he) is the BabelFish translation:"Chevrolet sent to a campaign to the style "publicity 2.0" where it published a series of elements in line (music, sequences of video, images, etc) so that any person could compose an announcement on the new Chevy Tahoe and gain a battery of prizes.
It is good, if this became or, Chevrolet could learn much of how their clients (or any individual interested in taking control of the prizes) saw and expressed the characteristics of the product. The bad thing, is that people are producing SO opposite announcements, that now in GM they cry and they erase them.
Confused ladies and horsemen of marketing and publicity of GM: one is not "to leave network it forms the message, which later we appropriated ourselves", is to make a product or to offer a service f*&#*g amazing.
Thus yes one leaves people it designs the announcements. While that does not happen, they make an announcement, they buy TV and magazines, and they drill the "message" to people in the head by force of repetitions, not of dialogue. "
Got that confused ladies and horsemen?
Google and Babel Fish: Worth What You Pay forThem
Ardian at SRF Global Translations explained:
"The purpose of machine translation is to let people who do not speak the source language get a quick idea about the contents of the text. The results are often funny, because the machine cannot properly construe the metaphoric and idiomatic uses of words, and comes up with silly mistakes.
"Damas y caballeros", for example, is a very common Spanish expression for "ladies and gentlemen"; the Babelfish machine here translates "caballeros" as "horsemen" and the result is funny, because the text is obviously not targeted at horsemen.
The Spanish "pila de premios" is rendered as "battery of prizes", because "pila" also translates as "battery", and the machine often picks the most probable of the various meanings of a word. Babelfish is a free translation program, so one cannot expect much from it. As a rule of thumb, free translation programs should only be used as a preliminary tool, before having the texts translated by human beings.
If you "ladies and horsemen of marketing" find BabelFish and Google translations confusing, email or call Sloan Friedman at SRF Global Translations at 212. 391.7528 for a professional translation. Don't leave English without him.
Related posts:
- How Culturally Biased is Technorati?
- Incorrectly Translated Blog Posts Can Be PR Landmines
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