An excerpt from
Globally Speaking
A 21st-Century Approach to Successful Communication
Authors: David W. Paul and Martin A. Schell
Tailoring a Text to Fit the Audience
Just as Americans speak English differently from Britishers, so too Spanish varies between Spain and Latin America, French between France and Québec, and Portuguese between Portugal and Brazil. As just one of countless examples, take the word tortilla, the thin pancake so familiar to all of us who love Mexican food. If you ask for a tortilla in Spain, however, you'll get an omelet, because that's what tortilla means in that country.
What is localization?
Localization means rendering a text into a local culture's patterns of usage — a target dialect, so to speak. For example, a training manual being shipped to Argentina might be published in a special Argentinean Spanish edition. A localized manual has the virtue of being vernacular. It speaks to the audience in a familiar style, with local idioms.
Michael Anobile, founder of the Geneva-based Localisation Industry Standards Association (LISA), describes localization as "a process that enables a product to be used and sold more effectively in international markets." The need for localization became apparent during the last half of the twentieth century as manufacturers began to enjoy truly global markets, with the possibility of selling a single product to virtually every nation on earth.
If translation is tricky, localization can be even more so. The annals of global marketing are full of stories about translations of product names and advertising slogans that worked well in some countries but failed miserably in others.
Roger E. Axtell has recounted a number of translation gaffes in his book Do's and Taboos of Using English Around the World (John Wiley & Sons, 1995), based on his experiences as Vice President of Worldwide Marketing for The Parker Pen Company. When Parker set out to market a new product, SuperQuink bottled ink, around the middle of the twentieth century, they coined the advertising slogan "to avoid embarrassment," and translated it into Spanish as para evitar embarazo. Although this Spanish phrase can be translated literally as "to avoid embarrassment," it has other connotations. In Mexico, the Parker folks learned — too late — that the phrase idiomatically means "to avoid pregnancy." Ironically, the famous pen company caused itself embarrassment.
A more positive early experience with localization was that of Standard Oil/Esso, which changed its name to Exxon in 1972. Before the name change was finalized, the new name was tested for pronounceability in more than 100 dialects of 56 different languages.
As products became more sophisticated and the international market for them expanded, localization efforts intensified. Computer products are a good example. In 1998, Apple Computer introduced the iMac in 140 countries, translating its marketing materials into more than 50 languages and dialects. An equally striking set of figures relates to the popular office software Microsoft Word, which contains spell-checking dictionaries for fifteen dialects of Spanish, nine of English, and five each of French and German. Word even includes dictionaries for two dialects of Norwegian.
Localization also applies to the domestic market in a multicultural country such as the U.S. For example, many ads are localized for Spanish-language newspapers and radio stations in order to appeal to Hispanic Americans. For some companies, such as telephone service providers, such ads are a key element in a national marketing strategy that takes their multilingual customer base very seriously. Eric, a team leader for AT&T's international consumer long distance group, once told Martin, "Customers whose first language is not English are a minority of our customer base, but a very valuable one. Often these customers spend the most per minute and call overseas the most frequently."
Localization clearly complicates matters for a company's marketing department. A text can be localized either during the translation process or as an editing step after translation, but either way the process adds to the effort and expense. And yet, it is necessary for a multicultural market. Marketing, especially advertising, depends on appealing to popular tastes, and this means using language that consumers can identify with. Advertising requires few words but — as every copy writer knows — those words have to be exactly right for the audience they are aimed at.
For longer texts, such as users' guides and employee, technical, and training manuals, accuracy of translation is paramount. Just developing such documents in English is very labor-intensive, and translating them adds to the task. Localizing the translation for a wide international market increases the task even more — to the point where it may become overwhelming. Nevertheless, it's often worthwhile, and sometimes necessary, to localize long documents.
But there's a limit to the number of markets for which you can localize a text, whether it be a multi-volume document or a short one such as a product announcement. Even megacompanies such as IBM and Sony cannot localize their documents into all the thousands of dialects that are spoken in our world.
Where do you draw the line?
Localization is costly. The real question is whether it is cost-effective. Costs naturally rise as a single text is localized into more and more dialects. Even if it makes sense in terms of your global market to localize your products extensively, there is a point at which you will experience diminishing marginal returns.
How many languages and dialects should you translate into? Apple decided that 50 was the right number for its iMac marketing materials, but there is nothing magical about that number. Different companies have different marketing strategies and each product requires a careful assessment.
We can't give you a definitive answer or even a rule of thumb. The situation depends on many variables: your budget, your media, the English skills of your targeted market segment in each country, the importance of increasing your market share, and many other factors. What we can do is explore the issue of limits and offer some information that may help you make a well-reasoned decision.
How many people speak how many languages?
According to a study made in 1996 by Sidney Culbert of the University of Washington, there are 223 languages that have over 1 million speakers each. (There is quite a bit of overlap because many people speak more than one language.) Indonesia has 16 languages on the list, the Philippines has 10, and Nigeria has 9. However, the official language of each of these countries serves as a lingua franca: Bahasa Indonesia, Filipino, and English, respectively.
The official language of the People's Republic of China, Mandarin, is spoken by 90 percent of the population. In addition, there are large numbers of people in that country who speak other forms of Chinese; for example, Cantonese and Wu have at least 60 million speakers each.
Hindi presents a more complicated case. Although spoken by about half the population of India, Hindi is limited as a lingua franca in that country because some localities and even entire states resist its official use. In fact, the constitution of India recognizes no fewer than 15 state languages, including Telugu, Tamil, and Marathi, which have over 70 million speakers each.
Other very large and well-known lingua francas are Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Portuguese, French, and German. In addition, there are large regional markets represented by Bengali (Bangladesh and eastern India), Japanese, Urdu (Pakistan and India), and Punjabi (Pakistan and western India). Smaller, but still sizable, markets involve languages in the 50 million club: Korean, Vietnamese, Italian, Turkish, Thai, Min, Swahili, Ukrainian, and Polish.
Weighing the options
Perhaps you're surprised by the names or numbers of some of these languages. Numbers aren't everything, however, and it is likely that other factors will influence your decision about translating into a particular language. If you're a businessperson, your primary consideration is whether or not the market represented by a language can generate enough revenue to make localization profitable.
Another major factor will be the availability of resources for translating into each language or dialect. In the United States, there are more translators who can handle the dialects of Spanish, French, German, and other European languages than there are qualified translators for most non-European languages. The low supply generally makes it more expensive to translate into an Asian or African language, as well as more difficult to find a third party who can verify the accuracy of the translation.
One option is to get the translation done on site, in the country or locality where it will be used. In countries with relatively low standards of living, this option will probably save money. An additional advantage is that the localization will almost surely be more up-to-date in terms of local idioms. Even native speakers of a target language can get out of touch with the latest trends in their mother tongue if they've been living outside their country of origin for a few years.
On the other hand, translators who live in the U.S. are less likely to be confused about an English word that has multiple definitions and variations in usage. This points to a major disadvantage of having the localization done overseas: You have less control over standardization. If you are localizing on site in several countries, it will be more difficult to ensure that all of the translations are faithful to the meaning and intention of your English original. And if your company lacks a branch office in one or more of the countries, the difficulty will be compounded.
Let the computer do it!
The production of documents has accelerated dramatically in recent decades. In line with the old saying "Necessity is the mother of invention," companies have sought ways to automate the process. Online help files, report generation software, and word processors all emerged as useful tools during the early 1980s. Naturally, the question arose: "If we can automate the production of technical manuals, annual reports, and business correspondence, why not their translation, too?"
Indeed, in many countries where English was not widely spoken, such as Japan, translation was basically a form of clerical work, almost as mechanical as data entry. The typical translator worked entirely from a dictionary, translating a text word for word, as literally as possible. Surely, a computer could do the same thing, given the right software, a high processing speed, and enough memory for a large dictionary.
As the 1980s wore on, computing power began to increase by leaps and bounds, and people began to look seriously at the dream of computerized translation, sometimes called machine translation. It was promoted heavily in Japan as a technology that could support Japan's booming economy. Language barriers were a serious obstacle in the drive to open up new markets for exporting consumer goods.
Although computing power increased thousands of times more during the 1990s, translation is still a task that is too complex for computers to handle completely. There are just too many irregularities, quirky idioms, and ongoing fluctuations in language. No computer code has yet been developed that can successfully make all the decisions and subtle choices that a human translator must constantly make.
One example of a valiant effort was AltaVista's Babelfish, a Web site that offered instant, interactive translation done by a computer. Translations can be made in either direction between English and five other European languages: French, German, Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese.
Although Babelfish broke new ground, not only by employing state-of-the-art translation software but also by providing translation over the Internet, the results are often inaccurate and sometimes ludicrous. For example, if you ask Babelfish for a German translation of the famous America Online email announcement "You've got mail!" and then ask it to translate the result back into English, it comes out "They have post office!"
Here's an even more amusing example, taking a line familiar to Americans and translating it into French and then back to English:
