the ultimate online exercise system!

Hi folks,

Welcome to wordFitness, the eZine from The Word Gym . In this issue, we discuss some of the often-overlooked language issues that can affect digital marketing materials.

We also look at print publications – specifically, at some of the problems that can make layout and typesetting a nightmare when foreign languages are involved.

As you know, this is a milestone year for us (we’re celebrating our 20th anniversary in business!), and so far it’s been a tempestuous year for everybody! We wish you all good things as spring reluctantly but steadily advances.

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Digital marketing – the part played by language

Today, thanks to the Internet, advertisers and marketers enjoy a global reach that’s fast and – in principle! - cost-effective.

There are so many ways products and services can be promoted via the web: microsites, websites, banner ads, video, eDMs, corporate blogs, social networks, and cunning viral combinations of all of the above. The list is enormous, and innovative marketers are constantly finding new ways of interacting with all these increasingly versatile media.

While advertising and marketing tools have changed radically as digital marketing overtakes the traditional kind, the basic principles remain the same. Marketing is still about engaging with people, and still uses the psychological techniques associated with traditional media. The demographics used in e-marketing are the same, albeit more finely granulated than before. But the reach is much wider, and the opportunities for personalisation are much greater. Which is why geo-targeting has taken off.

What’s in a place?

Geo-targeting means that marketers can target their audiences according to their actual, physical location. The technology is most widely used on websites: different content is served up to website visitors depending on where they are (their location can be determined by an increasingly sophisticated range of criteria, from country down to individual IP address). Geo-targeting is also increasingly popular in mobile applications (many smartphone apps make use of GPS data, for example). The possibilities are extraordinary – but so are the opportunities for getting things badly wrong.

There are many reasons for this, from the common-sensical (e.g. just because somebody is accessing a website from a computer based in Germany doesn’t necessarily mean that (a) they’re German or (b) they want to see the German-language version of the website) through to the cultural. In what follows, we’re going to assume that the common-sense aspects have been taken care of by sensible, sensitive programming (e.g. by providing easy-to-find, easy-to-use alternative options). Because of what we do, we’re particularly sensitive to the cultural side of things.

To be effective, promotional materials must use appropriate language and reflect appropriate cultural attitudes. The online challenge is especially acute, however, because the window of opportunity is very, very small: readers must be engaged instantaneously so they stop and read the website, banner ad, e-mailer or other communication. The moment-by-moment experience created by the materials is critical to a campaign’s success. Language plays a key role in this: crafted creative copy will help to “fix” the product/service in the reader’s unconscious mind. If the translation is crude, literal and hard to read, the visitor will swiftly surf away from the digital honeypot. That’s an opportunity lost.

Crude web trawling triggered by sophisticated stimuli

Younger generations with a very sophisticated awareness of market dynamics are coming online. Marketers observe some of their browsing habits and argue “hey, these guys are quite happy to use Google Translate to read info about all kinds of stuff, so why incur any more expense”. Yes, younger digital users are very adept at trawling through vast amounts of crudely presented information. But the original impression made on them, i.e. the reason why they’re interested in a particular product or service in the first place, is anything but crude – it’s based on an elegantly crafted piece of advertising, marketing or social engineering designed to arouse and maintain sustained interest.

Copy is an important part of this original impression. The copywriter has to take many factors into account when “writing up” a product or service: demographic, style, tone, messaging, psychological impact, attitudes etc. The translated copy must do the same for target audiences with culturally and linguistically differentiated expectations.

Young people in particular are often plugged into a webwork of different media (the approach is described as “media meshing”). 16-24 year olds listen to, watch and interact with multiple media types simultaneously – surfing the web and typing instant messages on a computer while listening to music and exchanging text messages on a ‘phone. So it’s critical that marketers work out the right stimuli to make sure their material stands out from the crowd.

Just one tiny example of media meshing

In 2006, while 92% of 16-24 year olds were watching TV… 
… 90% of them were also using the Internet
… 69% of them were also listening to the radio
… 62% of them were also reading a newspaper
… 51% of them were also reading a magazine

Mediascope Europe 2008, p. 33

“Multitasking is a given for this generation. The bet that all communicators of the near future will want to win will be share of affinity and interaction, rather than just attention.”
Christian Lazopoulos (Senior Strategic Partner, Saatchi & Saatchi)

Internet marketing means that campaign-to-market timeframes are becoming shorter and shorter as companies vie to be heard first in a tumult of many voices. We’ve seen the detrimental impact this has on campaigns as marketers opt for quick, cheap, transliterations of promotional copy to support a fast, low-cost market launch. This assumes speed is the primary criterion. But as we pointed out earlier: while the mechanisms of marketing may be changing, the rules governing effective marketing – marketing that leaves a lasting impression – have not. It’s worth bearing in mind that:

… while over 350 million people in the world speak English as their first language, and about the same number speak English as a second language (at very varying levels of proficiency), the global Internet population is now well over one billion. And in non-English-speaking regions it’s growing much more rapidly. That’s a huge number of potential customers who are unable to read English-language websites or appreciate downloadable marketing materials.

ICANN so you can

In November last year ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) approved the creation of URL addresses in multiple languages – heralded as the biggest change in Internet history and opening the floodgates for all kinds of new creativity. What’s more, this change will have a profound impact on online marketing and search engine optimisation in countries that do not use Roman alphabets.

More than ever, companies that do business internationally will need to design and launch websites and online campaigns with appropriate, market-specific URLs and content in multiple target languages if they are to take full advantage of the new opportunities. New developments in HTML5 also promise huge new opportunities (see below).

About The Word Gym

We’ve been an independent B2B / B2C copywriting and creative translation provider for, yes, 20 years; we specialise in producing multilingual advertising, marketing and promotional copy for corporates and communications companies worldwide. We also provide language consultancy and management services.

Find out more on our website at www.wordgym.com, e-mail us, or ring us on +44 (0)1887 820 100.

Pitfalls of foreign-language typesetting

You can come across all sorts of exciting pitfalls when you’re setting foreign-language text in layout. We’re going to mention a couple of important ones.

Punctuation…

Don’t assume that a language that appears to share your alphabet shares your punctuation! Most obviously this applies to line breaks (word separation) – each language has its own hyphenation rules, and while DTP programs have, in recent years, improved their ability to hyphenate many different languages, they still occasionally make drastic errors. But there are less obvious traps for the unwary. For example, most of us speak at least a little French. Did you know that French routinely puts a space before certain punctuation marks, such as colons, semi-colons, question marks and exclamation marks? As well as inside quotation marks? French doesn’t use quotation marks, of course: it uses double chevrons or guillemets. And that’s a language many of us think we know! Let’s look at a typical French sentence:

« Mais qu’est-ce que tu t’imaginais ? », me dit-il ; « je ne le crois pas : tu voulais lui en parler ! »

Yup, all those spaces are necessary! We’re not even going to talk about the more traditional speech marks (similar to em-dashes) still used in many French publications…

We’ve lost count of the times well-meaning typesetters have removed all the carefully coded hard spaces in a French Word file when transferring the text to their DTP program. The cost in proofreading/replacement time can be huge!

… and fonts

The situation with fonts has improved – foundry-specific fonts are gradually giving way to cross-platform OpenType fonts, which mean that a file prepared on a PC can (in theory at least!) be transferred to a Mac and then copied and pasted into Quark Xpress or InDesign without mangling all the characters. But there’s still a long way to go, especially when non-Roman fonts are used (e.g. in Chinese, Japanese, Russian etc.). Multinational companies that want a consistent corporate “look” across all their multilingual documentation are well advised to look very carefully at the various fonts they want to use – not just in their print publications, but also in their digital material.

Remember: foundry-specific fonts may not transfer at all, because:
a) the fonts may be available on one platform (e.g. PC), but not on another (e.g. Mac);
b) keyboard layouts may be different on each platform
c) you may have a licence for the font on one platform, but not on the other.
d) character set support may vary from platform to platform, so e.g. it looks great on PC, but has gaps on a Mac.

And finally, foundry-specific fonts are usually incompatible with public-domain fonts (such as those supplied with Microsoft Windows or Apple MacOS), and with fonts from other foundries. The result of trying to transfer a document produced in Microsoft Word using a Times New Roman font into e.g. InDesign using a customised font from a specific foundry can – depending on the language and font used – be a garbled mess of nonsense characters. Or more insidiously – because it’s a great deal more difficult for a proofreader to spot - just a few characters may be garbled.

More generally:

English speakers are lucky – there’s an enormous range of typefaces to choose from. Other languages don’t necessarily have such a broad choice; some (e.g. Cyrillic alphabet-based languages) are positively anaemic.

On the positive side, there have been some amazing advances in the provision of support for a wider variety of fonts online. “Browser-safe” fonts have been extended by such cunning utilities as FontJazz, for example, and a raft of new standards enabling support for more fonts on websites are being proposed as part of the new HTML5 framework. Many of them are in use already .

Howler of the month!

Safety and information announcements provide a feast of “how not to do it if you want to be taken seriously”
moments…

From a Russian airline safety brochure
“Airlines staff can ask you for something concerning smoking and we beg you to follow its advices and recommendations. If you possess strong will and are able to decline smoking during the flight, non-smoking passengers and the crew will appreciate your generosity and respect for them”

That’s good to know – but what about those unfortunates who don’t possess a strong will…?!

From a safety sign in a Bucharest hotel lobby
“The lift is being fixed for the next day. During that time we regret that you will be unbearable.”

Hm. Sounds like there are a lot of stairs…

From a Chinese sign for a sewage treatment plant
“Dirty Water Punishment Place”

Now that sounds truly nasty.