The Translation of the Advertisement
Date: 2015-10-07; view: 573.
The goal of any business today is to have a presence in both the national and international markets. But to do this, it is essential to have a good marketing strategy and, of course, proper translation and localization of both the text and the image used for advertising your product.
Translations of advertising texts are one of the most creative and requiring particular cautiousness translations. The difficulty of such translation hides in the right rendering of semantic and emotional meaning of the text. It is not always so simple because different people have different values and evidently different perception of the same phrases or gests. Thus, for instance the famous automobile Chevrolet Nova would never have any success in its original denomination in Spain, because there the word combination «no va» mean «not moving », «not driving ».
When Gerber started selling baby food in Africa, they used the same packaging as in the US, with the smiling baby on the label. Nobody bought their products. Later they learned that in Africa, companies put pictures on the labels of what's inside, since many people can't read.
When American Airlines wanted to advertise its new leather first class seats in the Mexican market, it translated its «Fly In Leather» campaign slogan literally. So this slogan came out in Spanish as «Fly Naked» (vuela en cuero).
In Taiwan, the translation of the Pepsi slogan «Come alive with the Pepsi generation» came out as «Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead».
The Coca-Cola name in China was first read as «Ke-kou-ke-la», meaning «Bite the wax tadpole». Coke then researched much to find a phonetic equivalent «ko-kou-ko-le», translating into «happiness in the mouth».
All this seems to us to be just funny translations, but such kind of carelessness can cause the large companies to loose a big number of consumers and sometimes to compensate the damages related with the claims on abusive interpretation of an advertisement.