Posts Tagged ‘german’
International symbol, icon blunders can be avoided
Some of my European colleagues still remember when the old Macintosh operating system of the 1980s used a trash icon that Apple’s European users confused for a postal box. Why was the icon confusing? People across the globe have different cultural ideas and assumptions about what things are supposed to look like. In other countries, trash cans [...]
Preventing Mistranslation is Easier than Retracting Translation Blunders
Benjamin Franklin said, "an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure." This is true in translation. As illustrated when a magazine ironically added Google mistranslations to an article about translation quality in bold, red print, it is easier to prevent mistranslations than it is to retract mistranslations and fully recover from [...]
Downplaying Linguistic Ability Can Sometimes Be to Your Advantage in Business
It is a saying well-known to most Americans — “Nobody likes a show-off.” Resisting the urge to flaunt your language skills can sometimes be a strategic benefit, and a measure of modesty may earn you a better impression. The benefits of such modesty were exemplified in the aftermath of a disastrous 2009 German-to-English translation error. [...]
Localizing Humor
According to the article, "I don't get it: Humor lost in translation," it can be difficult to translate humor from one language or culture to another. Translators can sometimes find equivalent jokes that will be funny in the target language, but here are a few resources to help identify country-specific humor and jokes: Reader's Digest, "The [...]
P&G’s International Brand Check
"Proctor and Gamble likely understood the benefits of a single global brand nearly 70 years ago when it considered launching a new soap named "Dreck" in the United States. According to the book New Products Management by Charles Crawford, shortly before the company introduced the soap to U.S. consumers, it discovered "Dreck" sounded like German [...]
International Brand Checks Save Brand Names
International brand checks can help to prevent disastrous international blunders. The following example from the article "Prevent International Blunders" shows an example of one company that does this correctly. ...Rolls-Royce is a company that proactively works to prevent these types of blunders. Just before Rolls-Royce launched the Silver [...]
Golden Rule of Localization
Former German Chancellor Willy Brandt once said, "If I am selling to you, I speak your language. If I am buying from you, dann müssen Sie Deutsch sprechen." In other words, then you must speak my language, German. This might be considered "the Golden Rule of Localization," to localize for buyers as you would have sellers localize for you. [...]
Internationalized Domain Names
Are you already localizing your website content into other languages? Consider doing the same to the website URL. Consider acquiring ccTLDs (country code top-level domains) like ".de" and ".es" for your multilingual website. ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) has recently approved non-Latin ccTLDs. Prior to this [...]
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 [...]
