Posts Tagged ‘arabic’
The wrong marketing picture can be a thousand words lost in translation
Starbucks recently released its new logo, which features a green image of its well-known siren. Noticeably absent from the image is any text mentioning the words Starbucks or coffee. International business experts praised this move as a way to eliminate the need for logo translation. In this case, a single, almost universally understood image [...]
Don’t Touch Me: Personal Space Lost in Translation
Indonesian Information Minister Tifatul Sembiring experienced an awkward moment when shaking the hand of visiting U.S. first lady Michelle Obama in November 2010. What was so embarrassing about the handshake to inspire one U.S. journalist to jokingly label it “the cutest political sex scandal ever?” Sembiring is a proud conservative Muslim [...]
Local Export Assistance Remedies International Headaches
Considering all that can go wrong when exporting to international markets, businesses can find it very reassuring to have someone on their side when tackling new exporting challenges. Local export and import assistance proves to be a great resource when trade challenges arise. In the 1980s, the Iranian government encouraged a razor manufacturer [...]
Iranian Brand Stinks in Qatar
Tiz, an Iranian razor manufacturer learned that its brand name really stunk in Qatar. As mentioned previously, many companies will benefit from an international brand check before entering new markets. The following account is from "Educator Insights: International Marketing Blunders Revisited - Some Lessons for Managers" by Tevfik Dalgic and [...]
Microsoft Game Banned in Saudi Arabia
Tom Edwards, former head of Microsoft’s geopolitical product strategy team, has openly related some of the international blunders that led to the creation of his team and the tightening of controls surrounding international releases. One of these anecdotes was recently referenced in the article "We all benefit when global business leaders share [...]
United Nations Interpreter Bloopers
United Nations interpreters are among the best in the world. However, UN interpreters work under very stressful circumstances and do not have the luxury of an editor to review words before they are spoken. Under such circumstances, UN interpreters are bound to make an occasional mistake. According to the BBC, one mistake actually resulted in a [...]
Community Translation for Health Care
Google has announced the launch of a community translation project for health care called "Health Speaks." The program is seeking volunteers to translate high quality health articles into many languages, starting with Arabic, Hindi, and Swahili. For the first 60 days, (Google) will donate 3 cents (US) for each English word translated to the [...]
Language Use by Region
What are the top 10 languages by population in New York and other states? Where are the most Armenian speakers living in the United States? The U.S. Census used to track and report the number of language speakers for virtually every language in every state and county. This data was very useful for companies planning localized multilingual [...]
Language and Country Codes
Many multilingual websites are organized using subdomains and subdirectories based on language codes or country codes. These are usually ISO codes. See the following example that Google gave for a French website in Canada using the alpha-2 code for the French language: French language code subdirectory: www.example.ca/fr French language code [...]
Language and Country Names List
English speakers expect that a link to an English language/country option on a website will be listed in English, not translated into another language. Otherwise, how easily would an English speaker find a link to English content if the language name were written in Asian, Cyrillic, or Middle Eastern characters? Or how easy would it be if the [...]
