Marketing to a specific audience in a single language in a single country can be difficult enough, but attempting to create a message that can cross borders and linguistic barriers can be exceptionally difficult, requiring care, sensitivity and skilled translation services to achieve.
Part of the reason for this is that unlike translating legal documents, leaflets, instruction manuals or professional correspondence, where the goal of the communication is to translate information from one language to another, marketing is as much about creative expressions of ideas.
This often relies on metaphor, idiom and cultural signifiers that do not always translate from one language to another, and sometimes even the same language when certain countries use it differently.
A case in point is the rather unfortunate Hyundai Kona, a car named after a Hawaiian island but one that translates into Polish as “Hyundai faces an agonising death”.
This is not the most optimal image to give to customers, but given that the word “Kona” has even ruder translations in Indonesia and Portugal, the entire embarrassing affair led to the car being renamed the Kauai in certain regions.
A slightly different issue is the story of the Japanese sports drink Pocari Sweat, a name used in Japan, Asia and the Middle East, but also one that has ironically stopped the product from being successful in English-speaking regions.
In Japan, the name is meant to evoke the replenishment of nutrients sweated out during a rigorous exercise session, but in English-speaking countries, the name implies that the drink is made of sweat.
Slogans are particularly challenging to translate, as they are the most likely to rely on wordplay, idioms and culturally limited phenomena.
One of the most infamous examples of this was Kentucky Fried Chicken’s expansion into China, retaining and literally translating their existing slogan “Finger-Lickin’ Good” into Chinese.
The problem with literal translation is that the slogan became “eat your fingers off”, something that KFC rushed to fix before it could do any harm.