Translating Badly: It's Easier Than You Think

One memorable mistake is all it takes for your company to go down in bad translation history. A recent SME Web article reminisces on some of businesses' worst translation mistakes and reminds us of some of the many ways a good translation can be derailed. Euphemisms and Idiomatic Expressions Creating advertisements for vacuums has to be tough.  Almost nothing rhymes with "vacuum," and nobody thinks about vacuums unless theirs breaks. So you can hardly blame the Swedish appliance company for thinking they'd struck gold with the catchy phrase "Nothing sucks like an Electrolux." This is one of those cases where running the idea by a native-speaking proofreader (or even a couple of American teenagers) could have caught the idiomatic error and prevented the company's message from backfiring. Translating Literally "Vuela en cuero" means exactly the same thing as "fly in leather," literally. But the image it creates in Spanish speakers' heads distracts from the intended message, to say the least. (Can you imagine boarding a plane to find all the first class passengers disrobed?) So, even when it works grammatically - which is rare - a literal translation may spell trouble. Unfortunately, these are only a couple of the ways translations can be done incorrectly, but all is not lost!  Knowing where potential pitfalls lie is half the battle. Choosing qualified translators who stand behind their work, allowing them plenty of time to complete the project, and double checking just in case (a good idea no matter what you're doing) can go a long way to ensuring that your translations tell your customers what they need to hear - and are only funny when they're supposed to be.