Tomedes Blog

While most businesses realize the importance and value of expanding marketing campaigns to foreign markets, it can be a risky business without the proper professional marketing translation service. Accurate marketing campaign translation and localization is essential; not only within the language it is translated to, but it must also be accurate within the foreign cultural context.

Thousands of marketing campaigns have embarrassed their company because they did not do their homework thoroughly when it came to marketing translation. For example, Pepsi showed us that even multi-billion dollar corporate giants can offend foreign markets when they do not use professional advertising localization. They were sued by an Indian city court in 2004, for advertising a commercial which to the local Indian market, portrayed glorified child labor. Whether it was improper < translation from English to Hindi, or just negligent advertisement localization, the lawsuit – and the loss of the entire Indian market – could have been avoided by employing experienced Hindi translation services and translators.

Even advertisementtranslation from English to Irish was botched by a telecom company marketing campaign to the Northern Ireland market. In the mid-90’s, a telecom company called “Orange,” had a famous winning slogan: “The future is bright…. the future is Orange.” When “Orange” took their telecom marketing slogan and campaign to Northern Ireland – without any regional ad campaign localization - it did not go over well with the Irish Catholic population. For them, reference to “Orange” in such a context refers to the “Orange Order,” or Protestant Loyalists. So to the Irish Catholic, the slogan read, “The future is Orange, the future is Protestant Loyalist.” You can imagine the offense taken by what seemed like a very slanted, bipartisan telecom ad. A business can never be too careful – even when the languages are mutually intelligible.

Yet another example of a botched marketing campaign was from an old American computer company called “Wang,” when they tried to market their slogan “Wang Cares” in the UK market. To the company’s confusion, UK affiliates refused to air or print the slogan “Wang Cares.” You can guess why. If even American to British marketing can be occasionally botched, all the more reason to use a for localized marketing campaigns directed at foreign language markets.

Spanish advertising translations have recently been on the news many times. As available and prevalent as English to Spanish translation is, you would think marketing campaigns would go the extra mile and use professional Spanish marketing translation. It is obvious that when the “Got milk?” ad campaign asked the Latin American market “Are you lactating?” that they did not hire any kind of professional translation service. If it was the translation rates they were worried about, it’s unlikely they were aware that Tomedes has the lowest translation rates available from any top translation company. What excuse does any marketing division have now?