Do you market your products overseas?

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Last Updated On: February 7, 2018

Do you market your products overseas? Are your products advertised in the language spoken in the countries and regions where you are selling them? Do you own, manage or have marketing responsibilities for a company that intends expanding its sales to parts of the world where English is not spoken as a first language?

Marketing is all about communication with your potential customers and if you think that effective marketing can be accomplished using English as a medium it is unlikely that you are going to sell many of your products. You need to use effective and accurate marketing translation services to get your message across to the people you want to sell your goods to.
Some businesses try and cut corners and use cheap and ineffective methods of translation. There are some amazing blunders committed by marketing that has no depth of understanding of the target language or culture. The history of international marketing is littered by mistakes, some of which were funny, others plain nonsense. An example is KFC’s ‘finger lickin’ chicken’ slogan, which was translated into many different languages to cater for the places where KFC established their chain of restaurants. In Chinese, a literal translation of the slogan read as “eat your fingers”. One wonders what the Chinese first thought about KFC’s chicken recipes!
Honda had to do a quick change to the name of one of its cars in 2001 when the Honda Fitta originally marketed in Scandinavia wasn’t very well received, perhaps not surprisingly as the word “Fitta” in Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish was a vulgar term for women’s genitals. The car was soon remarketed as the Honda Jazz!
A British Asian Foods manufacturer called Sharwoods, marketed one of its sauces as ‘Bundh sauce’. This got howls of rage from Punjabi speakers because the word meant “bottom” in Punjabi.
And so the list goes on. Of course, it is not just individual words that get mistranslated. It is phrases as well. The solution is to use a marketing translation company that understands the importance of marketing and ensures it gets your message across in the target language in such a way that no-one in that country knows that it is a translation. A NAATI translation service is able to get your marketing material translated effectively as well as doing cross cultural marketing research which prevents the sorts of mistakes that can be so damaging to your firm’s reputation like the examples mentioned above.