Industry Issue: Lost In Translation

One important thing to know about advertising in an international market is that you must be sensitive to others cultures, and languages. Most advertisers who market over seas, or who just market to the large (and growing) Hispanic market in the United States, will over look this fine detail. This has been a topic of discussion in a few media classes that I have taken at Ithaca College. One famous example was the "Got Milk" campaign.

The "Got Milk" campaign is a national canpaign in the United States done by Gooby Silverstein & Partners, to entice people to start purchasing and drinking milk again. When they translated the slogan into Spanish they realized that the literal traslation meant "Are You Lactating?" NOT "Got Milk". They than did the smart thing and hired Siboney USA, a spanish-language advertising agency, to do an adaptation of the campaign. This is a very common occurance in the advertising industry. Companies try to traslate their own campaigns without the help of professionals in the foreign market. According to a survey done by TransPerfect Traslations Inc. in 2003, "of 513 people surveyed, 57% said they had spotted advertising that was incorrectly translated from English into other languages. [article: Lost In Translation The Wall Street Journal Europe - September 19,2003}

TransPerfect Translations Inc. is a service with the mission "to provide the highest quality language services to leading businesses worldwide." It is agencies like these that save companies from running into trouble while expanding to other cultures, like the Coca-Cola co. when it first came out in the 1920s.

Coke expanded to a global proportion in the 1920s. In China, shopkeepers who sold the product tried to find characters that translated the brand name. The literal translation turned out to be something along the lines of "female horse stuffed with wax" [Lost In Translation].

Companies and marketers just aren't allocating enough money and time to foreign campaigns. They spend as little time as possible on translating the copy. It isn't enough to just translate. Companies now need to adapt campaigns to the foreign culture or they might be at risk of loosing an entire demographic.

I now make a call to action, for marketers and advertisers to stop being lazy!! And start paying attention to the cultures of their demographics and to start catering to those people.