I’ve been thinking about the inherent difficulty in translating an ad or campaign across different cultures. Slogans or slang phrases often don’t translate directly into another language. And how would a marketing person who isn’t acquainted with the other language be able to know that the translation is accurate?
For example, my family and I recently watched an Air Canada commercial that was translated into Cantonese. My mom is a Chinese-to-English translator, and she immediately recognized that the translated version of the ad’s slogan was awkwardly phrased and not at all catchy. And since the whole ad was premised on the repetition of that one phrase, the whole ad… tanked.
In another instance, last year my mom translated a print ad for Lansdowne Centre, a mall in Richmond. The heading of the ad was, “Bundle Up in Style: Fall into autumn at Lansdowne Centre”. I still remember the difficulty she had (while cursing the creativity of the person who came up with the concept) in translating those seemingly simple lines: it was hard to find a phrase in Chinese that captured the subtle meanings of “bundle up”. It was harder to work with the pun of “fall into autumn”. (In Chinese, as far as I know anyway, there is only one common set of characters that means “autumn”.) If she translated the other meaning of “fall”, Chinese readers would wonder why they had to trip over themselves into autumn.
As the global economy grows, more and more companies will stumble into this translation problem. At best the translated ads would be puzzling; at worse the mistranslation may even be laughable or offensive, ruining the brand’s image. One last (in)famous example: translated into Chinese, Pepsi’s “Come alive with the Pepsi Generation” unfortunately became “Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave”. Shudder!