\u00a0<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve been thinking about the inherent difficulty in translating an ad or campaign across different cultures. Slogans or slang phrases often don\u2019t translate directly into another language. And how would a marketing person who isn\u2019t acquainted with the other language be able to know that the translation is accurate?<\/p>\n
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\u2019s 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\u2026 tanked.<\/p>\n
In another instance, last year my mom translated a print ad for Lansdowne Centre, a mall in Richmond. The heading of the ad was, \u201cBundle Up in Style: Fall into autumn at Lansdowne\u00a0 Centre\u201d. I still remember the difficulty she had (while cursing the creativity of the person who came up with the concept)\u00a0in translating those seemingly simple lines: it was hard to find a phrase in Chinese that captured the subtle meanings of \u201cbundle up\u201d. It was harder to work with the pun of \u201cfall<\/em> into autumn\u201d. (In Chinese, as far as I know anyway, there is only one common set of characters that means \u201cautumn\u201d.) If she translated the other meaning of \u201cfall\u201d, Chinese readers would wonder why they had to trip over themselves into autumn. \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n