The Trouble with Words

6331_Anholt_01_jm.qxd 11/24/99 3:17 PM Page 1 1 The Trouble with Words Once upon a time, there was an airline which decided to run a spe- cial promotion on its busy route between Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and London, England. Aware that here was rich potential for linguistic di- saster, the marketing department decided to play safe and have their London agency devise a simple poster in English, which could then be safely translated into Arabic. “Fly to London this Autumn,” ran the line, “and save up to 20% on the normal return fare.” The posters were made, the campaign ran, and the promotion was a huge success. Such a success, in fact, that the following month, the people in the Saudi office decided to throw a party for their English colleagues. At the party, the marketing manager for the Middle East drew aside his English colleague and said, “I’d just like to thank you for the excel- lent poster you created for us. I’m certain that it was the main reason for the wonderful success we’ve had. That famous English creativity! I’ve been saying it for years. We need a bit more of that over here!” The Director of Marketing was flattered, and thanked his colleague, but the man carried on: “It was so unexpected, so . off the wall, so zany. I just don’t know how you people keep coming up with these ideas.” The Director of Marketing began to feel confused: “Well, you know, we weren’t even trying to be especially creative on that ad— you should see what we can do when we really pull out all the stops!” 1 6331_Anholt_01_jm.qxd 11/24/99 3:17 PM Page 2 THE TROUBLE WITH WORDS But his Saudi colleague just replied, “Ah, the famous British mod- esty! No, in my book, it was genius. Especially the bit about the restaurant.” The Director of Marketing made an excuse, hurriedly left the party, and found somebody to translate the poster back into English for him. What it said was as follows: “Fly to London this Autumn and save up to 20% on the normal return fare. AND while you’re there, don’t forget to eat at Ahmed’s famous Kebab Oasis at 526 Edgware Road, where you will be treated like a prince.” Ahmed, it turned out, much, much later, was the translator’s brother-in-law. He now owns two Kebab Oases on the Edgware Road. A WORD ABOUT LANGUAGE That story always goes down rather well when I tell it, I sus- pect because it plays so unerringly on the deepest fears of many international marketers: when you’re responsible for communications in a language you don’t personally speak, you believe that you know what you’re running. But actually, it could be saying literally anything at all, and you just wouldn’t know. This fear is symptomatic of a very common but funda- mental misunderstanding about the function of language in advertising, often characterized by an unshakeable con- viction that language is a secret key for resolving every imaginable problem in international marketing communications. Time and time again, I see clients and their agencies fall into the trap of believing that a British or American team can create an ad in the English language, and turn that into an Egyptian or Thai or Guatemalan ad simply by translating the English words into Arabic or Thai or Spanish. You put it like that, and it seems obvious that it’s not a very intelligent way to behave. Yet look at the way people 2 6331_Anholt_01_jm.qxd 11/24/99 3:17 PM Page 3 A Word about Translation create international campaigns, and it’s clear that most of the time they’re behaving exactly as if they believed that the only difference between an English or American consumer and an Egyptian consumer is that one speaks English and the other speaks Arabic. A strange attitude indeed, especially since it is constantly confirmed and reinforced by the practices of global ad agencies—companies which style themselves as strategically- minded international communications consultancies. But there you go, and I don’t see too many signs that this approach has changed over the years: every day, somewhere in the world, scarily junior people working on major global briefs in major global agencies are still treating the creative part of their international campaigns as nothing much more demanding than finding the cheapest translation company in the Yellow Pages. If you’d like to prove for yourself that this is really not a language issue, just cut a press ad out of a British or Aus- tralian magazine and paste it into an American one (or vice versa). See? It looks totally out of place, and that’s nothing to do with the fact that Brits spell “color” wrong. The whole ad actually feels wrong: it’s designed, laid out, typeset, pho- tographed, targeted, argued, written, conceived in a way which is totally alien to the American consumer. It sort of smells wrong. It has the wrong pheromones. Consumers are, alas, not stupid: they have uncannily sensitive cultural antennae, and can detect an ad which was never really meant for them in the first place from about a hundred yards downwind. A WORD ABOUT TRANSLATION You don’t need to work in international advertising for very long before you notice that translation is something which people lie awake at night worrying about a great deal. And, in my experience, very few of them have even the remotest 3 6331_Anholt_01_jm.qxd 11/24/99 3:17 PM Page 4 THE TROUBLE WITH WORDS idea what it actually is, and how singularly irrelevant it is to the whole business of creating international advertising campaigns. Read any textbook on export marketing, overseas trade, global branding, or international advertising, and look up “translation” in the index. There is usually a short paragraph or modest section dedicated to it, in which the author shares with us some profound findings, gleaned over decades in the business, about this mysterious topic. Here’s a fine example from one weighty tome, which is otherwise an extremely authoritative guide to the practical issues of export marketing: Translation is made easier if advertisements, sales letters, mail-drop leaflets and so on are drafted in simple English. It follows that colloquialisms, figures of speech, metaphors, technical terms, and humorous expressions should always be avoided. The people who put together the initial copy should attempt to think in a multilingual way, assuming from the beginning that the material will be translated. Short and simple sentences are preferable to complex statements.1 Leaving aside for a moment the fascinating philosophi- cal quandary of how a monolingual person can think in a multilingual way, let me précis the author’s advice: the best advertising for any overseas market is the literal translation of a basic, formal, bookish, expressionless, non-technical, and humorless English text. Presumably, the author is not recommending that we adopt the same techniques for developing domestic advertising. From another book: “Always make sure you have a native speaker check over the translations before you pub- lish them”; “always make sure your translator is properly qualified” is another such gem from an equally respected source. What are these people talking about, I wonder? 4 6331_Anholt_01_jm.qxd 11/24/99 3:17 PM Page 5 A Word about Translation Translating advertising copy is like painting the tip of an iceberg and hoping the whole thing will turn red: what makes copy work is not the words themselves, but subtle combinations of those words, and most of all the echoes and repercussions of those words within the mind of the reader. These are precisely the subtleties which translation fails to convey. Advertising is not made of words, but made of culture. Translating copy is like boiling lettuce. No matter how carefully you do it, the result is always disappointing. And you can call it what you like—I hear people using words like adaptation, transcreation, transculturation, transliteration,2 even the spectacularly inelegant transadaptation—just as you can poach, scald, sear, or steam your lettuce, but it’s still a culinary felony and it’s still not going to make anyone’s mouth water. Translating copy is like picking fruit from one tree and trying to glue it onto the branches of another. The fruit will wither and eventually rot, and anyway, even if a miracle hap- pened and you could find a way of grafting the living fruit onto the branches, the fruit would still be growing on the wrong tree, and nobody in their right mind would want to pick it and eat it. Translation is like washing your socks on the wrong pro- gram—somehow, when they come out at the end of the cycle, the colors are fainter, they don’t really fit you any more, and you might as well just throw them away and buy a new pair. Enough silly metaphors. It’s easy enough to show how little translation actually achieves. Take even the simplest, most basic of concepts: a cup of coffee. Surely, you might think, this can be simply translated from one language to another—after all, it’s not a subtle piece of sophisticated creative writing. A dictionary will confirm that “a cup of coffee” can be directly translated into its precise equivalent in any language on the planet—for example, “una tazza di caffè” in Italian. What could be simpler? 5 6331_Anholt_01_jm.qxd 11/24/99 3:17 PM Page 6 THE TROUBLE WITH WORDS “A cup of coffee...” Nothing, except that it’s not the same thing at all: “a cup of coffee,” if you’re British, means a half-pint mug filled with equal quantities of lukewarm dishwater, instant coffee gran- ules, and sugar.

Load more