Posts Tagged ‘marketing’
Stinky Swedish Product Names Lost without Translation
In the fifties and sixties, there was a Swedish car magazine named "Fart." "Fart" is a Swedish word meaning "speed." Although this likely caused no problem in the magazine's home country, rumors abound that this was quite embarrassing when the writers would travel to international car and racing events. Fifty years later, another Swedish [...]
Chinese Manicure Set | Product Label Translation Error
In celebrating the Chinese New Year this week, how many people do you think used this wrongly labeled manicure set? Ouch! Contact GGI for translation of product descriptions that will leave you proud, not embarrassed.
Chinese Restaurant Named “Translate Server Error”
Machine translation is not appropriate for restaurant signs. In this case, someone input the Chinese name into a machine translation program, unaware that the application was not working at the moment. Without having a human check the result, they submitted it to the sign maker and posted it above their restaurant. That is why boingboing.net [...]
Kill the Russians? | Japanese Video Game Localization Error
A few months ago, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was released and began setting numerous world records for video game sales. Unfortunately, the game also received negative publicity for including some frustrating mistranslations. At the center of the issues is the "No Russian" scene, in which Vladimir Makarov is supposed to tell the player [...]
Top 10 Web Languages
If you want to reach non-English speaking internet users, what languages should you focus on first? Well, the answer depends on several different factors. However, if you would like to reach the maximum number of internet users, regardless of other demographics, then you might consider some of the top languages spoken by internet users [...]
Google notranslate: Preventing Automatic Translation by Google
If your company website has already been localized or if you plan to localize it into other languages, you will want to ensure that your clients see that high quality human translation, not the machine translation provided by Google. Google can provide automatic translation of search results for users browsing in other languages. However, Google [...]
Pee Pee Phone Brand Does Not Pass “the Snicker Test” | Japanese Brand Localization
A few years ago, International Systems Research (ISR) released a softphone in Japan called the PPPhone (pronounced "pee pee phone"). Unfortunately, that name does not pass what some people call "the snicker test" in English and many other languages where "pee pee" is understood to mean something else. ISR had some good reasoning for using the PP [...]
