Over the last week, a couple of things happened that made me think about the importance of language and localized content, especially in a business setting. The first thing was humorous in nature. A Japanese department store posted English language signs in its windows for a sale using an unfortunate four-letter expletive.  Although I do not know whether or not it was intentional, it did garner enough attention that it was covered in more than a few places on the web and spurred discussion in the blogosphere on language and translation.

The other thing was a fascinating email and conversation with a colleague on the importance of not only knowing the spoken language or languages of the country you are trying to do business in, but also having the context of culture and history in order to communicate effectively.  In this particular instance, my colleague was referring to Mandarin which to westerners already seems complex enough with its thousands of characters. However, as my colleague explained, it has also posed unique challenges to the computer industry, which has primarily been driven by Americans using a language that only has 26 characters. Think about the poor developers that had to tackle the problem of coming up with programming solutions to handle all the characters in character based languages – challenging indeed!

It’s all interesting stuff. And it’s also a reminder to keep various things in mind when working with multinational companies where localized programs will need to be developed.  Perhaps the most important thing is to work with partners that have a true understanding of not just language, but also culture, history, politics and in some instances the technological challenges of using computers to write in languages not based on the Roman alphabet.

At McBru we work with many companies that have a multinational footprint. As such, some of the campaigns we work on need to be translated and localized into other languages in other countries. There is nothing like the insight you will get from choosing translation and localization partners that are immersed in a specific culture and language. It’s the difference between making an embarrassing mistake and capturing a truly valuable lead.

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