How to make your brand go further

Every company knows the importance of brand research. It is essential that your branding communicates your company’s values to consumers, resonates with your audience and carries the right associations and attitudes that people will link to your company.

Now imagine that you have found the perfect branding, a slogan that works beautifully and a tone of voice that gives your brand the right identity. More often than not, you will have hired a professional brand consulting team. You are doing great in your home market and are thinking of taking your brand abroad. Should you just go ahead?

The short answer is yes, but plan carefully. Of course you want to be able to harness the huge potential of foreign markets, but just like it takes a lot of work to develop a brand in a market, there should be a significant amount of research carried out before attempting to enter a new market.

The best way of achieving this is through multicultural brand research and transcreation. First of all, it’s important to research things such as the associations that certain words, colours and images may have in the target market, as they may differ greatly from your culture. You want to avoid blunders such as the famous Mitsubishi Pajero.

Secondly, transcreation, a combination of content creation and translation, can help preserve the essence of your brand in the target language, whilst respecting the cultural conventions and expectations, which translates into brand understanding and engagement.

So, in order to make your brand go further, it is best to work with a team who knows the target market well and can provide the necessary brand research information, as well as excellent copy that resonates with your audience and communicates your brand values. One brand that has achieved that beautifully in China is Nike, whose transliterated name “Nai Ke” also carries the meaning of being enduring and persevering, two concepts that perfectly match their products. And they’re doing great in the country, which shows the importance of good market research.

What is International Spanish?

One of my clients, who I have been working with for quite a while, recently decided to stop translating into Spanish for Spain and start translating into International Spanish. Aside from the challenges that this poses for me as a translator, the decision made me think. What is even International Spanish? Does it exist or is it a myth?

The RAE (Real Academia de la Lengua Española), which is the body that regulates the use of Spanish language, certainly doesn’t refer to International Spanish, even if it does differentiate between Castilian Spanish and American Spanish (which encompasses both the Spanish used in the US and in Latin American countries).

But what do people actually mean when they talk about International Spanish? Although the debate keeps raging on, I am of the opinion that International Spanish doesn’t exist, that is has been made up in order to facilitate communication across digital channels, and may I say so, to reduce translation costs in some cases. International Spanish is meant to be a kind of neutral Spanish which all fairly educated Spanish speakers will be able to understand no matter where they come from, and which avoids regional variations and local terminology and grammar which can be confusing, sound unnatural or even be offensive in other Spanish-speaking markets.

I can understand the case for International Spanish. After all, it’s the second most-spoken language in the world. Over 400 million people speak Spanish as a native language in no less than 31 countries, so it would be hard to localise content for each one of those countries. However, it’s precisely because of this wide range of speakers that it is just not possible to adopt one type of Spanish that all speakers will find natural.

Every country is different and so is its culture. Even basic words can change across locales. For instance, “car” is “coche” in Spain, whereas in many Latin American countries it’s “carro”, which in Spain refers to a horse cart. “Bicho” in a bug in Spain, but it can also be a naughty child, whereas it Costa Rica saying someone is a “bicho” at something it means they’re very good at it, and in Puerto Rico it refers to the male sexual organ. Then there is the word “chongo”, which refers to a one-armed person in Chile, a type of hair style in Mexico, a tame horse in Puerto Rico and a lover in Argentina. And that doesn’t even cover grammar, sentence structure and slang/common expressions.

Then there are also stereotypes. For example, in Spain, Latin American accents have long been ridiculed, especially from countries like Mexico, Venezuela and Colombia, one reason being the TV programmes from those countries that have been broadcasted in Spain. Although nowadays people are more accepting, there are still a lot of political and immigration issues that shape the way Spaniards think of Latin Americans, and despite the fact that opinions can vary widely and some other accents like Argentinian and Cuban carry more positive stereotypes, most customers in Spain will not react well if you try to market your products to them using a Latin American variant.

So even when trying to use the so-called International Spanish variant and keep the language as neutral as possible, there will be significant differences across the countries and the text will not sound completely natural in any of the markets. Therefore, in order to achieve true engagement and realise your full potential in those markets, it is always best to localise your material for the particular locale you are trying to target. If, understandably, localising for 31 markets seems like an overwhelming prospect, the best solution is to research what markets will be mostly beneficial to you and stick to those. 

5 tips for successful app localisation

I recently read this blog entry by app developer Laura Tallardy http://lauratallardy.com/app-localization-made-easy/ and I was pleased to see, from a developers’ perspective, how important localisation is for the success of the product and in increasing market share. She provides some excellent technical tips that will come in handy for anyone seeking to localise their app. This inspired me to add some additional advice from a localisation provider’s point of view, which I hope you find useful.

1. Plan for localisation from the beginning

Integrating localisation from the beginning can help avoid some of the costly problems that may arise later if the app has not been designed in a localisation-friendly way. Consider technical issues, like the ability to support all kinds of characters, text directions, and date and currency formats. Also think very carefully about the markets you want to access based on their potential.

2. Research your target market

Once you have decided the markets you would like to access, you need to research and understand your customers, just like you would in your home country. What makes customers tick in one country might not be the same in another, so when localising some of the most important text, like the store descriptions, make sure to adapt it to the local market taste and expectations. Researching the most popular keywords in each market goes a long way in gaining visibility; Google AdWords and Trends are useful, but another trick is to start typing a word in the App Store search box and wait for suggested search terms. And don’t forget different countries may have different app stores!

3. Style is key

You have spent weeks or even months writing your app, so why risk ruining it with stilted text, awkward translations or plain unintelligible text? Direct, literal translations hardly ever work. Jokes, common expressions, cultural references and such need to be adapted so they are meaningful to the target audience. Style needs to be carefully considered in order to engage your audience, so it’s important to work with the right professionals, who are familiar with the app market and the style you are trying to portrait.

4. Bear in mind text expansion

It is very important to consider that languages are not all the same length. Whereas languages like Japanese and Chinese tend to be very short, other languages like French, Spanish and German use more words or longer words to convey the same message, which can take around 20-30% more space than English.

5. Test, test and test!

Test thoroughly your localised apps in all languages to make sure that everything works, the text is displayed correctly in the right place and there are no issues such as clipped text, incorrect line breaks and untranslated strings, as well as any other errors that might have crept in.