Do you intend selling your goods in Australia? Marketing is all important for any company anywhere and the greater the competition, the more you need to market your own brand. Any company that considers expansion into an overseas population is faced with the task of getting its message across in another language, as well as another culture. Sometimes, tried and tested language translation isn’t enough. You need to use a marketing translation service that understands the peculiarities and needs of marketing in a culturally aware context.
There have been a lot of marketing translation blunders over the years which should serve as a warning to any company that wants to market their goods and services outside their own country. Even within the same language community, slogans can be misunderstood. American expressions, for instance, are not always the same as Australian ones. The word “toilet” in the US is a place where you wash and clean yourself, whereas a “bathroom” in that country is a place where you relieve yourself!
There are many examples of these sorts of errors and they should make any company wanting to sell their products overseas hurry along to a NAATI translation service to do their marketing translations for them. Mitsubishi, the huge Japanese corporation, committed a translation blunder a few years ago when it released the “Pajero 4 wheel drive.” In Spain, the word “pajero” means “a jerk”, so you can imagine how popular these cars would have been in Spain until the name was changed to “Montero”! Branff Airways came out with a slogan entitled “Fly in leather” which, when translated literally into Spanish, came out as “Fly naked.” One wonders how many Spanish ticket holders tried taking their clothes off when embarking on a Branff Airways flight!
The point is that if it’s easy for big companies who have the money to get their products translated effectively to make mistakes, it’s just as easy for your company to make them, too. Meanwhile, your competitor may very well be laughing behind your back and selling their own product much more successfully because they’ve gone to the trouble of using a marketing translation service that got it right.
