When Translations Miss their Mark

Misunderstandings are a part of everyday life, but when those misunderstandings do damage to your business or your brand, you’ve got a problem.  Marketing and public relations gaffs happen all of the time.  It doesn’t take long for the Twitterverse to explode with tweets highlighting a company’s communication errors – effectively spreading the word faster and more efficiently than any planned marketing campaign could.

Some of these mistakes are unavoidable.  People are prone to saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.  It happens.  Given that social media is unforgiving of these mistakes, it’s important for companies to safeguard their brand with accurate and locally appropriate translations of their marketing materials.

Bad Signs

To a certain degree, most people are used to seeing signs and other advertisements that contain errors.  Most often, the reacting upon noticing these errors can range from a shrug to a laugh to outrage.  But more important than the initial reaction is the lasting negative impression that errors leave with potential customers.

Even when materials are prepared by native speakers, mistakes can occur, so it should surprise no one that translated materials are even more prone to feature a misplaced word or an unfortunate phase.

Marketing Translation Services

Setting the unavoidable errors aside, companies that attempt to translate their marketing to a global audience often encounter circumstances where their message is literally, “lost in the translation”.

Marketing translation companies occupy a niche within the translation services industry to address this messaging need.  Unlike legal document translation, which is often a word-for-word translation of a legal document or contract, marketing translations focus on successfully delivering the message while accurately expressing its meaning.

Repairing the Damage

Brands can and do recover from the consequences of mistranslations, but they may expend a lot of time, money, and effort in doing so.  If the mistranslation is an isolated instance, the recovery can be speedy, whereas a mistake in a logo or at the center of a large-scale marketing campaign can result in a longer-term defense posture for a company – draining resources and obscuring the message.

Often an apology and a promise to be more careful will suffice and appease the public, as these kinds of blunders become “old news” quickly, but companies shouldn’t expose themselves to these types of errors because they opted to process their translations “on the cheap.”  Any upfront investment that is made in producing quality translated material pales in comparison to the expenses related to cleaning up a major marketing translation mess.

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