Visitors to South Korea, take note. The Korea Tourism Organization (KTO) has set a bounty on the awkward, low-quality translations known as “Engrish.” These malapropisms are a prime source of amusement for tourists abroad in Asian countries (see The Top 10 Asian English Translation Failures for examples), but locals are generally somewhat embarrassed by their existence. Plus, when you’re a tourist trying to navigate a foreign country, mistranslations don’t help.

It’s understandable, then, that the KTO would make it a priority to improve the quality of translations available to tourists. What’s interesting is the way in which they are going about it. As CNNGo reports, from now until December 14^th, you can go to the Visit Korea website and submit pictures of translation mistakes from any tourist site in South Korea. When you do, you’ll be entered to win the Korean equivalent of a $45 gift card, accepted anywhere credit cards are taken.

However, there is one important caveat: since the KTO doesn’t have any authority over roads or restaurants, they aren’t accepting pictures of poorly translated road signs or menus.  However, they will pay to fix signs at tourist spots that contestants highlight during the contest.

Also, while the contest is open to everyone, you’ll probably need at least a working knowledge of Korean to get through the application process. There is no English translation provided for the event home page or the entry form, and Google Translate seems to be unable to process it.

Even if you don’t plan to enter the contest, if you’re in Asia and you spot one of these humorous word salads, go ahead and snap a picture of it. The world is getting smaller every day. Sooner or later, “Engrish” will become increasingly rare as people are able to access better translations – and that will be a mixed blessing, indeed!

Orginal Article on K International's Language Blog | A Bounty on Engrish

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One of the most important aspects of language preservation is the ability to record the language in writing. However, many endangered languages lack an orthography, or writing system. UNESCO notes that “it is extremely difficult to estimate how many written and unwritten languages there are in the world, and there is no established source of information.” What is certain, however, is that languages that can’t be written down suffer from a competitive disadvantage, as may the people who speak them.

One such language was ciShanjo, spoken in Zambia’s Western province. Nancy Kula, a linguist at the University of Essex, told the BBC that the language “is very much under threat of extinction.”

Until recently, the lack of a writing system made it even more vulnerable, but that has changed as representatives of a ciShanjo-speaking village collaborated with linguist Paul Tench to devise and standardize a spelling system for their language.

The BBC has an excellent article up in which Professor Tench described the process:

“All of these people were literate in the [local] trade language siLozi and English; they knew from these languages the consonants and vowels of the Latin alphabet and what they stood for in those two languages. They applied this as best they could to the sounds of the words in their own language. Then they discussed things together in their mother tongue to agree solutions to any problems that arose. I kept a tally of the letters used and arranged them in a chart that reflected phonetic patterns.”

The end result of the project was a booklet on how to read and write in ciShanjo, a dictionary, and some stories written in the language, all tools that will be essential for teaching ciShanjo speakers how to write in their mother tongue and in preserving the language for future generations.

Just as important, the project has given members of the community a sense of pride and hope that they did not have before. Enoch Walubita, one of the farmers who worked on the translation, explained “We were thinking we are nobody, but now we are the same as everyone in the world.”

Orginal Article on K International's Language Blog | Zambian Farmers

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Thinking of moving your business to China? A word to the wise: hire a skilled translator! As a recent article in the New York Times points out, translating a business name into Chinese requires

much more than Google Translate; you also need a deep understanding of the nuances of Chinese culture to avoid utterly humiliating yourself.

As the Times explains:

“More than many nations, China is a place where names are imbued with deep significance…Given that China’s market for consumer goods is growing by better than 13 percent annually — and luxury-goods sales by 25 percent — an off-key name could have serious financial consequences.”

Sometimes, it’s enough to use Chinese characters to indicate how your brand name should be pronounced. However, you have to be careful to avoid unintended double meanings. For example, the word “Bing” in Mandarin has a few possible meanings, including disease, defect and virus.   A direct phonetic translation could easily leave a Chinese consumer afraid that the search engine would crash his computer.  Microsoft went with “Bi ying” instead, which sounds similar but means “responds without fail.”

For many brands, the most effective strategy is to choose a brand name that has positive connotations for Chinese consumers. If the name turns out to be phonetically close to the original English, so much the better. Here are some examples:

Nike- “Nai ke,” enduring and persevering.
Reebok- “Rui bu,” quick steps.

Colgate- “Gao lu jie,” revealing superior cleanliness.

Citibank- “Hua qi yinhang,” star-spangled banner bank.

Lay’s- “ Le shi,” happy things.

In this 2002 study, companies that chose a Chinese name with a positive meaning were found to be associated with better performance, in the form of increased brand loyalty and commitment. Companies that used a neutral phonetic translation were seen as demonstrating a “passive attitude toward consumers, making it difficult for Chinese consumers to understand the brand’s meaning, and demonstrating indifference toward the target market’s perceptions.”

Orginal Article on K International's Language Blog | Brand Name In China

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At its last conference, Apple introduced Siri, a robotic virtual system that comes embedded in the new iPhone 4S.  Right after it was introduced, Apple caught a lot of flack for Siri’s name, which sounds vulgar in both Japanese and Georgian.

Now that the product has been released to the general public, Apple is getting a different type of negative translation-related feedback. Though Siri is supposed to work with all US, UK and Australian accents, it’s apparently giving some Scottish users fits as it doesn’t always understand their commands.

Some Scottish users seem to have more trouble than others. It almost feels wrong to laugh at this poor bastard, for example, as he tries over and over again to get Siri to “create a reminder.”  This gentleman had a little bit better luck, but still had some problems setting appointments and sending messages.

According to TPM, Siri even has trouble with words like “cheers,” which it interprets as “chairs.” This caused Scottish novelist James Robertson to complain that Apple’s “linguistic imperialism” could have the effect of muting the Scottish people’s unique and beautiful accent:

“If the phone doesn’t recognise a simple word like ‘cheers’ it won’t recognise much. People are obliged to moderate their voices to make themselves understood by machines. It has the effect of modulating everyone’s voice toward the most powerful, dominant people in the world.”

What’s really galling is that the product’s instructions, as reprinted on the Daily Mail, say that

“Siri is designed to recognise the specific accents and dialects of the supported countries listed above [the US, the UK and Australia]. Since every language has its own accents and dialects, the accuracy rate will be higher for native speakers.”

Unless, of course, you’re from Scotland.

Orginal Article on K International's Language Blog | Siri Doesn’t Understand Scottish Accents

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Last week, Apple was roundly mocked for using the name “Siri” for its new voice-controlled personal assistant.  Apparently, they didn’t bother to see if the name would have any negative connotations in other languages. In fact, it sounds very much like “buttocks” in Japanese and is a particuarly crude way of referring to one’s penis in Georgian.

This week, everybody’s laughing at the expense of Nokia, who recently introduced a new, Windows-based smartphone called the “Lumia.” Sure, “Lumia” vaguely connotes “light” in English, but apparently Nokia didn’t check to see what associations it would bring to mind in other languages. Note to businesses: this is usually a mistake, especially if your company has a global business.

According to MSNBC, the connotations of “lumia” are more shady than they are luminous. The word is apparently a synonym for “prostitute.” Nice!

Why didn’t Nokia catch this? The word is not universal to all Spanish-speaking regions by any means. In fact, MSNBC did a little bit of research and found that “the word is the result of Gypsy dialects slipping into the Spanish language. It is not a particularly commonly used term and only appears in Spanish dialects with heavy Gypsy influences.”

However, they declined to let Nokia off the hook, saying

“This may explain why the folks at Nokia did not realize that they were giving their latest products an awkward name, but I still don’t see it as an excuse — someone should’ve cracked open an etymology book or twenty at some point during the product naming process and researched things.”

Not mention that all you have to do is enter “lumia” into the Real Academia Española website and you can instantly see that it’s equivalent to “prostituta.” So, they wouldn’t even have needed to crack open a book, really. It’s not as if Spanish isn’t the second most common native language in the world, either.

Orginal Article on K International's Language Blog | Another Week, Another Tech Translation Fail

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Language barriers and mistranslations are fertile ground for comedy. Chinese translations of English seem to be particularly vulnerable to gaffes, possibly due to a shortage of fluent English speakers and a corresponding over-reliance on translation software.

As an aside, it should be noted that English speakers have their own problems when it comes to translating Chinese characters. Also, at least our Eastern brethren’s translation failures seem to be confined to signs and menus as opposed to permanent tattoos. You can always change a sign!

Be that as it may, however, China has become somewhat famous for signs written in hilariously garbled English. It was partially these bad translations that inspired Tony-award-winning playwright David Henry Hwang’s  new Broadway play Chinglish. The play centers around an American businessman trying to land a lucrative contract in China, without being able to speak the language. As Hwang explained in an article for Broadway.com,

“On a trip in 2005, I was taken to a brand-new cultural center in the ultra-modern city of Shanghai, where my father was born and raised. The facility was amazing—Brazilian wood, Italian marble, German design. And then there were these ridiculously translated signs: For instance, the handicapped restrooms read, “Deformed Man’s Toilet.”

Many Chinese people feel that the existence of so many poorly translated signs is an embarrassment. In fact, the Chinese government has made a point of trying to clean up the mistranslations in cities where international events  are being held, like the Olympics in Beijing and the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai. However, while Mr. Hwang may be touching a sore spot,  he is not out to make fun of the Chinese.

In fact, the play is written and performed in two languages, with the Americans speaking English and the Chinese characters speaking Mandarin. English subtitles keep American audiences from getting lost.

Mr. Hwang told the Wall Street Journal that underneath the humor, the play examines how hard it can be to communicate across cultures:

“As our play tries to show, however, even when you literally understand the words, sometimes you might as well be speaking a different language, because underlying cultural assumptions and practices may vary dramatically between the two cultures.”

Orginal Article on K International's Language Blog | Chinglish

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Coca-Cola may have gotten its start in America, but it’s clearly an international brand. As such, it markets to people in many different languages. On Facebook, Coca-Cola uses the social media site’s “geotagging” feature to localize the content it presents to viewers around the world. So, viewers logging in from America are presented content in English, while viewers logging in from Mexico see content in Spanish.

Unfortunately, back in August, something went amiss with the geotagging filters, and posts intended for the page’s Brazilian and Romanian-speaking fans were shown to American fans as well, according to Ad Age.

The result, especially for the post written in Portuguese (which many American readers confused with Spanish), was basically an eruption of online idiocy. Many American readers were apparently unhappy about being made to read a language other than English, and they used varying degrees of incivility to express their displeasure.

Similar incidents have happened before- apparently a lot of Americans not only have no desire to “buy the world a Coke,” they would prefer not to be reminded that US-based companies also have customers who speak other languages. For example, when Best Buy made the mistake of asking its Facebook fans if it should create a separate Spanish website, “There were hundreds of negative responses flowing in, people posting racist, rude comments, according to marketer Tracy Benson. “Our contact center was monitoring this, and they were crying, waiting for a positive comment to come in.”

After a few hours, of course, Coca-Cola became aware of the problem on their Facebook page and fixed the settings. Ashley Brown, the company’s director of digital communications and social media, explained to Ad Age, “Now those posts are only viewed by the audiences in Brazil and Romania. We did this to avoid consumer confusion and the posts are still online where they were intended to be seen.”

Presumably Coca-Cola did remove the worst of the negative comments from American fans as a courtesy to its Portuguese fans.

What’s especially odd about this whole incident is that American Coca-Cola fans should be used to seeing foreign-language comments on the Facebook page from fans in other countries. In fact, if you visit the page, many of the comments are not in English at all. It seems that only communication from the brand itself aroused their ire.

According to marketer Peter Kim, this episode speaks to the importance of making sure that the right content reaches the right audience:

What happened here shows the critical importance of connecting with consumers on their terms and their expectations for content relevance. Easier said than done, when you’re a brand with global operations with brand fans around the world. So give them what they want.

Though the possibility for technological mishaps will always exist, using an experienced translation service to tailor your content for different audiences and cultures can help you do just that, eliminating one source of potential embarrassment.

Orginal Article on K International's Language Blog | Buy the World a Coke

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The distributors of the action movie Colombiana, which stars Zoe Saldana as a female assassin, ran into a bit of a hurdle when they tried to get the movie approved for distribution in Hong Kong.

The problem? An unintentional double entendre in the movie’s original Mandarin title, “Hei-lan-jiao,” which means “Black Orchid Beauty.” Unfortunately, in the local Taiwanese dialect Hoklo, “Hei-lan-jiao” sounds an awful lot like “penis.” Whoops!

Taiwanese government censors were not pleased with the translation. According to the Taipei Times, the Government Information Office called the title a “violation of public morals.” In a comment to Reuters, the department further elaborated that “While film promotion and marketing needs to be creative and eye-catching, one must also consider public perceptions, and in this recent case, the title went too far.”

The film’s distributor, CatchPlay Inc, defended itself to the Taipei Times, saying “The translation came from the story itself, in which the killer draws a black orchid on her victims each time she takes revenge. We are sorry and will respect the decision of the GIO.”

The title of the movie in Mandarin has since been changed to “Heilansha,” which translates to “Black Beauty Evil.” That’s probably for the best, anyway…if they’d left it “Hei-lan-jiao,” who knows how many customers would have gone in expecting something far more risqué and demanded a refund afterwards for false advertising!

This incident illustrates why it’s so important for businesses to use qualified translators for translation projects. Translation is not just a matter of changing words from one language to another. As CatchPlay learned, you also have to be aware of local dialects and slang to avoid any unintentional negative connotations.

Orginal Article on K International's Language Blog | Original‎ Chinese Translation of “Colombiana”‎

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In order for a language to survive, people need to want to speak it. Fortunately for the future of Gaelic, a new survey shows that the majority of Scottish citizens support efforts to promote the language.

The survey, “Public Attitudes Towards the Gaelic Language,” was conducted by the Scottish government. It found that 70 percent of respondents believed that more opportunities to learn Gaelic should be made available to the public. 53 percent of respondents would like to see the language make its way into everyday life more frequently. 80 percent of those surveyed were aware that Gaelic is still spoken in Scotland today.

Quoted in a Scotsman.com article about the study, the authors of the report stated:

“The key challenge therefore is not so much to increase awareness of Gaelic generally, given that it is already high, or indeed to do more to relate Gaelic to traditions and culture, but rather to promote the relevance of Gaelic to Scotland – as whole – nowadays.”

However, the survey’s findings weren’t all rosy. While the majority of respondents wanted to see Gaelic spoken more frequently, they didn’t necessarily want to be the ones speaking it. In fact, half of the people who took the survey said that there was nothing anyone could do that would encourage them to use the language more, or to learn it if they were unfamiliar.

Still, Gaelic Minister Alasdair Allan chose to focus on the positives, saying:

“Such a strong swell of support for Gaelic from across the country, not just in the Gaelic-speaking heartlands, is very encouraging and just reward for the efforts of those who are working hard to ensure it remains a part of modern Scotland.”

Orginal Article on K International's Language Blog | Majority Support for Gaelic in Scotland

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You’re familiar with the phrase “The customer is always right,” right? Unfortunately, when it comes to translation, new research from TransPerfect shows that businesses aren’t taking that advice to heart.

The survey examined attitudes towards translation among consumers and executives from across the globe. Clear, quality translation was a priority among the respondents who completed TransPerfect’s survey, with 63 percent of the respondents stating that they would be more likely to buy products from websites that have been properly translated into their native languages. When presented with a website with no translation options, consumers were forced to either “make do” with automatic tools like Google translate or to simply give up on the purchase.

The sample size of 200 respondents may seem small, but the results dovetail quite nicely with a survey published by Eurobarometer earlier this summer, which found that 42% of consumers wouldn’t buy a product online if the website was in another language. Really, can you blame them? Not being able to understand the terms and conditions of the website you are buying from is a recipe for poor customer experiences and dissatisfaction.

However, only 19% of the executives who took the survey called translating websites a “high priority,” and 64% were not even sure how translation would impact global sales for their business.

Why the disconnect? In an interview with BizReport.com, TransPerfect’s co-founder and CEO Liz Etling outlined some of the reasons:

“Many of the executives and decision-makers surveyed are English speakers and are accustomed to being able to read every website in their native language. Unless they have personally experienced a problem purchasing products on a non-native language website, I can see how it might be a challenge to recognize the difference a translated website can make in the consumer’s purchasing decision.”

In today’s increasingly interconnected world, quality translation and localization services are a smart investment for many businesses. Remember: the customer is always right!

Orginal Article on K International's Language Blog | Translation Higher Priority‎

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