Importance of translation in globalization and localization

Importance of translation in globalization and localization

The primary motto of all business concern is to target the global market. To reach the position, they strive hard to implement innovative ideas and undertake research to invent some exclusive products. Business concern puts more effort in bringing the products noticeable to the people from every nook and corner of the world. This is accomplished only through translation.

Role of translations:

Language is one of the huge barriers for business concerns to reach the global market. Some people might think that, keeping English as a common language, why people go behind translation? The reason is there are maximum countries which give priority to the native language. The translation services play a major role in both globalization and localization. A region is not supposed to contain with literate people alone. There are regions where an equal number of literates and illiterates and some region have illiterates in larger proportion. To make your product to be successful, it should easily reach all people from small child to senior citizens of the particular areas. To achieve this, translation is must which grabs the attention of people more when the terms used are more appropriate.

While doing translation, complete care is important. The person doing it should acquire deep knowledge in both the source language and destination language is must. They should be a scholar of that language and should know more than the native speaker. Some people think of using machine translation or hiring native speakers or multi linguist. That is totally a wrong decision and chance of losing reputation is more when any concern depends on any of those. History shows many examples of bad translation and some are listed below:

Examples of bad translations:

#1: Coca-cola: 

this was one of the top cool drink brands in the world. Despite of the familiarity across the world, they failed in the highest population place called china. Chinese is one of the complicated words to be translated and this is because of the strokes and four tones. Initially the brand name was changed from English to Chinese with the same pronunciation. As Chinese is a tonal language, the problem arose there that the word implies “bite the wax tadpole”. This created mess among the Chinese people. Later, the brand name was analyzed well and now it is changed with somewhat similar pronunciation which carries the meaning “happiness in the mouth”.

#2: Honda: 

Honda is the Japanese company who is familiar worldwide with the automobiles. But they failed in promoting their new brand called Honda fitta in Nordic regions. There are many European countries which still follow their native language and are not familiar with English. Nordic region is the northern European country which includes Iceland, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden. The word “fitta” has some vulgarity. So Honda changed the name as Honda jazz, which in practice now.

#3: Colgate: 

this is the different type of translation problem faced by the world famous consumer product company, Colgate. The company was affected when attempt to introduce the brand with the name called “cue”. Here the problem is not a bad translation. The word was right. But the problem is there was an ill familiar publisher under the same name. This made the company to face the problem.

#4 Chevorlet: 

Chevorlet is the American car manufacturers gaining popularity worldwide. They introduced one of their car models, Chevy Nova in Spain. This causes a fall of their market in Spain. This is due to the word “nova”. In Spanish “no va” carries the meaning “not going”. This phrase is the negative factor for the car. So it created a bad impact on people.

These are some of the effects of bad translations. To overcome this, hand over the responsibility to the reputed translation agency who provides professional translation services for business files and documents with complete accuracy.