The last month has seen more diamonds of economic news than there are in Cullinan mine. While British retail remains patchy, UK and other European companies selling “luxury” have done phenomenally well on the global stage. They have reaped dividends of promotion in emerging economies, especially in the Asia-Pacific region, targeting High Net Worth Individuals or those aspiring to perceived luxury.

Translation plays no small part in this global success: research has shown that the majority of consumers will only buy from websites with information presented in their language. This effect becomes more pronounced the higher the value of the product or service. (see Can’t Read, Won’t Buy: Why Language Matters, Common Sense Advisory)

A few news snippets illustrate the trend:

Paul Smith smartens up profits
Paul Smith, the fashion designer famed for his smart suits and signature rainbow stripes, has notched up a 31 per cent increase in pre-tax profits…
Turnover increased 15 per cent to £171.6m, but international sales were the star performer, rising 16 per cent in Europe, and 15.5 per cent in the rest of the world. By contrast, UK sales rose by just over 7 per cent.
Financial Times

Bentley leads convoy for mini-recovery in UK car production
December PMI figures and Bentley’s 37% global sales rise bring a little new year cheer to European stockmarkets
The luxury carmaker Bentley has defied the economic gloom with a 37% surge in global sales, producing a sparkling set of figures for 2011, powered by rising sales to China and the United States. It has forecast strong growth this year.
The Guardian

Ferragamo takes a sexy step on the red carpet
Asia-Pacific accounts for 36 percent of Salvatore Ferragamo’s global sales from January to September 2011. Paul Cadman, Ferragamo’s regional chief executive officer for Asia Pacific, says “The biggest challenge we foresee is how we will be able to keep up with the demand for our products given our forecast for the region for 2012. Our China market alone grew by 50 percent from January to September of 2011 as compared to the same period in 2010. Growth is what we anticipate for the region with our expansion plans, especially in China.”
The Philippine Star

China boosts Rolls Royce sales
Rolls-Royce said sales in Asia-Pacific grew 47pc in 2011. China is now its largest market. Sales in Germany and Russia more than doubled. Torsten Müller-Ötvös, chief executive, said “Our business is in excellent shape. We are developing our dealer network, moving into new markets like South America”
Daily Telegraph

China: number one for Rolls-Royce
Rolls-Roycerevealed that in 2011, for the first time ever, China over took the US as its biggest market. Arndt Ellinghorst, an analyst at Credit Suisse, pointed to South Korea, Turkey and South America as regions where demand was likely to expand rapidly. The proportion of sales across the luxury vehicle universe from “non-traditional” markets could grow to 60-70 per cent of total sales, he added.
Financial Times beyondbrics blog

This trend is not just present in exports but also in sales within the UK – to those who have travelled here.

Foreign tourists have boosted profits at top London store Harvey Nichols by 32 percent. Harrods saw a 39 percent rise, with Chinese visitors spending an average of £3,500 per visit. With an eye on this market, Burberry has spent £20m upgrading its London stores. Angela Ahrendts, Burberry’s chief executive explained to the Financial Times recently, “When Chinese consumers travel, they spend six times more than when they stay at home. Saying ‘I bought this in London’ adds further cachet.”

The effect extends beyond London too, at least as far as the Oxfordshire town Bicester – which boasts the only station in the UK with signs signs translated into Chinese and Arabic. The designer outlet centre Bicester Village is now the UK’s third-biggest tourist shopping destination after Harrods and Selfridges. Visitor numbers are expected to exceed 5.5m in 2012, with 40 percent of shoppers coming from outside of the EU and some two-thirds coming from outside the UK.

So, what conclusions should we draw from all this?

First, any brand that considers its products positioned at the premium or luxury end of the continuum should start taking emerging markets seriously. Of course, Arabic, Russian and Japanese remain key languages to be addressing consumers in but the list is expanding to include Chinese, Brazilian Portuguese and more.

Secondly, the “blank slate” of these markets provides an opportunity for brand transformation and hegemony – I wrote last year about wealthy Chinese tourists and Clarks shoes.

Finally, the internet is a cost effective place to start. Many companies get a shock when they see the number of non-English speakers among their existing visitors, never mind potential new ones. Isn’t it about time we started speaking to this global audience in their language?

The Sun says Aston Villa “refused to give up the ghost”. Wendy Richard calls her EastEnders character Pauline Fowler “the salt of the earth”. The England cricket coach tells reporters, “You can’t put words in my mouth.” Daily Mirror fashion pages call Tilda Swinton “a law unto herself”.

Now today’s Observer is going even further: it carries a full page article proclaiming “This is the age of the translator”. This marks the same anniversary and the recent appetite in the English-speaking world for “foreign fiction”, such as the Millennium trilogy by Steig Larsson, claiming “2011 has been an extraordinary year for the art of translation” But this is more than a paean to translation. The article also attempts to deconstruct what Google Translate does in contrast to what a “proper” human translator does, and quoting David Bellos (author of the excellent Is That A Fish In Your Ear?) saying

“Translation is what you get, but translation isn’t really what Google does. It’s like the difference between engineering and knowledge. An engineering solution is to make something work, but the way you make it work doesn’t necessarily have anything to do with the underlying things. Airplanes do not work the way birds fly.”

I’ve pointed out before how translating British English across the Atlantic isn’t always straightforward but I have to say this summary is “not bad at all”…





• In addition to multilingual translation, WorldAccent provides British English translation including localisation from American English.

(Click for professional American to British translator)

Even when two people apparently speak the same language, regional variations or a lack of local knowledge can lead to total misunderstanding.

The BBC recently reported that 1990s rap star Vanilla Ice will be appearing in a pantomime version of Peter Pan in Chatham on the north Kent coast.

In an age of globalisation, this news spread rapidly around the internet, especially in the United States. But you might expect that the US news reporters could have double checked what a pantomime in the UK actually involves.

For the benefit of non-British readers, pantomime is a raucous musical comedy, usually of traditional children’s stories, usually performed in the Christmas season. As wikipedia describes pantomime:

“a popular form of theatre, incorporating song, dance, buffoonery, slapstick, cross-dressing, in-jokes, topical references, audience participation, and mild sexual innuendo.”

The audience is encouraged to join in, with cries such as “He’s behind you” or “Oh yes, it is!”. The lead roles in these slices of Christmas slapstick are often taken by household names who have been famous in other fields such as TV, singing or even boxing. For example Anthea Turner, David Hasselhoff, Leslie Grantham, Jane Asher and Nigel Havers have all taken a turn in this popular brand of theatre entertainment.

Unfortunately for transatlantic commentators, pantomime of this type is not common in the US – leading them to assume that Vanilla Ice will be performing a silent mime version of Peter Pan:

“As a pantomime, Ice can only use his bodily and facial contortions and moves in order to act out the role.”

“The musician has signed on to play a silent version of Captain Hook in a performance of ‘Peter Pan’ at the Kent Central Theatre in England.”

“Learning the art of being a mime is the only logical move after effectively slaughtering the rap game and reality television… If you’re not excited to see Vanilla Ice communicate the role of Captain Hook using only facial expressions and hand movements than you obviously don’t have good taste in theater.”

“Vanilla Ice is taking one old adage to heart: silence is golden!”

“Playing a mime villain definitely trumps Ice on Dancing On Ice”

While pantomime itself is often seen as a bit laughable, here at the office we can’t help finding the mental image created by this total misunderstanding even funnier… “Oh yes, it is!”





• In addition to multilingual translation, WorldAccent provides document localisations into American English, British English, etc.

Pic: Stéfan via Wikimedia Commons



At first glance, do you think this picture shows a predominantly good or a bad day for investors on the Tokyo stock market? When working on your multilingual publications or websites it is worth considering the cultural significance of colours used in design and imagery.

The symbolic messages that we automatically read when we see certain colours may not exist in other contexts or for other groups of people. Remember that ideas about colours having automatic meanings are often arbitrary. They are not connected to a given and universal meaning. In some contexts a colour may not seem to have an inherent meaning, but people will often associate it with certain feelings. For example orange may create a feeling of energy. But in Ireland it will be more clearly associated with a symbolic association with Protestantism. However, beware of making sweeping generalisations about any given colour. It is possible in any culture to have multiple and yet automatically recognised associations of a colour; red is a particularly interesting example.

In the West, red is associated with warnings, anger and possible danger. It is also regarded as the colour of love and passion and is seen all over greetings cards stores when Valentines Days comes round. It is associated with Christmas (though this may be due to Coca-Cola putting Santa in a red outfit!) Red also signifies left wing parties and ideologies in Europe, while blue is associated with conservative politics. On the other side of the Atlantic however red has become associated with the more conservative Republicans and blue with the more liberal Democrats.

In China red is associated with good luck and new beginnings as we saw in the recent Chinese New Year celebrations here in London. In Japan red has connotations of “complete” or “clear” and combinations of red and white are associated with auspiciousness and happiness and are often combined at weddings. Red is positively associated with the sun and is represented as such on the Japanese national flag.

The Evening Standard recently reported that “Buyers from the West flock back to Japan”. They use an image of Japanese stock exchange screens awash with green numbers and the caption “Bounce back: the Tokyo stock exchange rose today as bargain hunters swoop in”. Sometimes using stock imagery can work but does it here?

An unsuspecting reader in the UK may assume the proliferation of green numbers indicates a rise in share prices, while red lights would indicate a fall or an alarm. The reality in the photo is the exact opposite: this image must have been taken on a bad day on the Japanese market. The figures lit in green indicate losses, not gains. The image at the top of this article shows gains in value, indicated by red lettering In the Japanese market. This may have better illustrated the Standard’s article.

One global colour coding that has gained a wide understanding is that pink is for girls and blue is for boys. This drives many, myself included, up the wall, and is actually a recent phenomenon. Have a look at these great photographs by South Korean artist JeongMee Yoon, “The Pink and Blue Projects” for more on that!

These considerations can be particularly important in a field we at WorldAccent find is becoming increasingly common: website translation. Designers of sites that aim to target several languages or communities may well want to consider consulting before deciding on a particular colour palette. As different colours suggest different moods and connections in different cultures, it may not be possible to suggest the right prompt to everyone globally. But considering your range of target audiences may rule some colours in or out at an early stage.

These questions are interesting in their right, but are also far from academic considering the recent success of some novels translated into English. After all, Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy are predicted by some to become the three top-selling novels of all time in Britain, overtaking Dan Brown’s paperback, The Da Vinci Code, which sold 4.5 million.

A recent well-writen article on the “Arabic Literature (in English)” tackles these questions:

I don’t, as a rule, object to “foreign” words in English-language texts. Would Beckman call Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart an ethnic glossary? And yet it’s full of untranslated terms, and not just the Big Three: flora/fauna, food, and dress. Many of the italicized terms, in Things Fall Apart, force the reader to try to see Igbo culture on its own terms instead of “in translation”.

On the other hand, italicized foreign terms are often unnecessary, exoticizing, and perhaps even misleading. Ahdaf Souief, in a talk at last year’s Emirates Lit Festival, said she was very careful when using Arabic words, and that “there must be a reason for it”.

Excellent points, I think. You can read further carefully considered pros and cons of “foreign language” words in translation in the full article, “It’s a Shame When a Novel Aspires to be a Glossary”.

Designers would probably start thinking how about how the ‘O’ cleverly combines textual and visual representation to deliver a single message, as with this poster for The Simpsons Movie:

We, on the hand, tutted knowingly, thinking: that’s practically asking for translation problems. As soon as it’s translated, the text and graphic elements separate back out (the word for “movie” isn’t necessarily going keep that nice O in the middle).

That doesn’t mean there aren’t ways around the problem. Here’s a French version of The Simpsons Movie poster:

Here, the doughnut is the O in ‘Simpsons’, a word which stays the same in the French translation. The doughnut motif would have been harder to incorporate if ‘Simpsons’ did not contain an O, but this is a nice sleight of hand and an elegant localisation. As a side note, we particularly liked the fact Lisa is pictured reading Victor Hugo.

The same trick could be used even in parts of Europe where the word ‘Simpsons’ varies slightly in translation. For instance, here is a Romanian translation of the poster:

What only the most avid fan might notice is that Homer is now clutching his doughnut with his left hand instead of his right. In fact, the whole image has been flipped to place the doughnut in the correct place to provide the O. Not a problem in Romania, but not a tactic you would want to use in cultures where eating with your left hand is taboo.

The unflipped version of the picture is used in a Portuguese version of the poster which simply separates the doughnut from the O.

But because of the layout, the Portuguese translation makes that second line look a little like “OO FILME” rather than “O FILME”. Still, not a big problem: Portuguese readers wouldn’t even link the doughnut with the O, because they know how “o filme” is spelt. Some might think the doughnut could have replaced the O in “o filme”, but this “o” means “the”. How odd would it look with “THE” as the largest element on the poster?

Of course, sometimes you simply have to let the text translation separate completely from the visual element. Here is a Korean translation of The Simpsons Movie poster, which just doesn’t have any nice doughnut-shaped letters to work with:

Does all this mean that designers should avoid such clever and innovative combination of letters and artwork? No, not at all. That would be overly restrictive on creativity. But The Simpsons poster is a fun example to show that if designers are using characters as graphic elements, they should think about the implications if their document is going to be translated. Even better, avoid painting yourself into a corner and ask for feedback from your translators at an early stage.

[NB: WorldAccent did not produce the above posters and they remain copyright of Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. They are pictured here only as an illustration of the issues that can be raised in translating graphic design]

One reason it’s easy to get correct is because Portuguese spelling, unlike English, is largely phonetic. But what happens in the cases when it’s not? And what happens when words have alternate pronunciations? Are they spelled differently? Should they be?

How to standardise spelling is an issue for all languages, and never a straightforward one. English spelling is a mish-mash of phonetic rules, grammatical rules, etymological rules, and exceptions and variations. Other languages have long adopted more systematic spelling systems: the first official Italian orthography dates back to 1582, French to 1635, and Spanish to 1713.

The first official Portuguese system was much more recent: 1911. It was adopted in Portugal and its overseas territories. But Brazil, which had gained independence nearly a century earlier, wasn’t consulted on the spelling reform, and didn’t adopt it either. Instead it introduced its own official system – similar but not identical to the Portuguese one – in 1938. So Portuguese spelling was standardised, but in two different ways.

Since then, there have been several attempts to unify official spelling across the whole Portuguese-speaking world, and an agreement was finally reached by representatives of 8 countries in 1990.

Various follow-up meetings ensued, and in the end it took nearly two decades before the first country adopted the new system: Brazil, in 2009. The other signatories to the agreement are still due to do so, with a transition period until 2012.

For Portuguese translation providers, this means that there are currently still two spelling systems in operation: one in Brazil, one for the other Portuguese-speaking countries. You’ll still have to specify which to use.

When the new agreement is implemented in all countries, does that mean that translation providers will no longer have to make the distinction? No. Brazilian Portuguese has further significant differences in vocabulary, grammar and syntax. So you’ll still have to distinguish Brazilian from Iberian Portuguese, even when they both finally use the same spelling system.

If you’re a Portuguese translator, you might find the following Portuguese links useful. This simple guide (in Portuguese) outlines the main changes made in the 1990 agreement. More entertaining to read is another guide (again in Portuguese) in which the writer pours scorn on the welter of misinformation surrounding the spelling reform, and tries to set the record straight.

This combination of languages opens any document or product up to a wide range of potential users. Turning to the strangely ever-useful CIA World Factbook, some plain economic facts bring this home all too clearly. Germany alone is the world’s 5th largest economy with an estimated 2008 GDP of US$ 2.8 trillion, more than a quarter greater than the UK’s equivalent output. France, Italy and Spain are 8th, 10th and 12th respectively on the same scale.

The numbers are even more staggering, with a combined GDP of about that of the United States, once you add in some of the other countries and regions where these are primary native languages – Austria, Mexico, Argentina, French-speaking Belgium, Switzerland, Quebec, Venezuela, the list goes on and on. There are also large numbers of people around the world who speak one of the FIGS languages as a foreign or second language.

As the FIGS languages use the Roman alphabet, they are relatively straightforward to use in a range of typefaces and on the web. This, combined with their large audience, makes these languages a popular choice especially when considering translation for a west European market. Many companies and organisations wanting to expand their reach are making use of FIGS translation and localisation services for their products, websites and documents.

After all, whether you are trying to win someone’s business or convince them of your point of view, there is no substitute for a stylish, well written translation in their native language. Everyone should give a fig about that!