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?

Meanwhile, the new year has brought a crop of online excerpts and short stories translated from Arabic to English via the Arabic Literature blog. Works include a short excerpt of Kamel Riahi’s al-Ghurila (The Gorilla), poems from Hussein Habasch and Joyce Mansour and a short story inspired by the Egyptian revolution from Hamdy El-Gazzar. The Arab Spring and its repercussions are also a dominant theme at the Beirut Book Fair.

The European Society of Authors is continuing to promote their annual “Finnegan’s List” in which well-known polyglot writers are asked to recommend titles by other writers deserving of wider translation. London author Adam Thirlwell gets one of the nominations. A PDF of the full list is available for download: Finnegan’s List [pdf].

One European author to obtain wider translation is Spaniard Javier Marías with seven titles from his backlist being translated into English at least, having been signed up by Penguin Modern Classics. The titles, which are all to be published at the beginning of August 2012, are All Souls, A Heart So White, Tomorrow in the Battle Think On Me, Dark Back of Time, When I was Mortal, The Man of Feeling and Written Lives.

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.”

It’s a brilliant introduction to the sort of conundrums that can crop up in translating even the most “common sense” concepts. The book itself, Is that a fish in your ear: Translation and the meaning of everything has been garnering some rave reviews.

While Shaun Whiteside in the Independent says

“I can quite imagine translators, particularly those who also do a spot of teaching, being consumed with envy at Bellos’s ability to entertain while getting difficult linguistic ideas across to the general reader… Is That a Fish in Your Ear? is essential reading for anyone with even a vague interest in language and translation – in short, it is a triumph.”

While Michael Hofmann in the Guardian says

“I could say anyone with an interest in translation should read Is That a Fish, but there wouldn’t be very much point; instead, anyone with no interest in translation, please read David Bellos’s brilliant book.”

(As an aside, the Guardian have also teamed up with Penguin Books to celebrate the book’s publication with a chance to win a £400 voucher towards a life changing volunteering trip overseas.)

These reviews were enough to get a copy of the book sitting on my desk. Its Prologue promises a wide ranging discussion including:

“What can we learn from translation? What does it teach us? What do we actually know about translation? What is it about translation that we still need to find out? … Is translating fundamentally different from writing and speaking, or is it just another aspect of the unsolved mystery of how we come to know what someone else means?”

Some big questions, but they seemed to be tackled in a fun as well as informative way. I am sure I will be sharing some interesting tidbits from the pages ahead. In the meantime, anyone wondering about the title should have a look here for some mostly harmless background!

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.

a series of events, each organised around a particular theme, with a diverse range of practitioners invited to participate including poets, musicians, architects and artists.

It takes place from 7pm at:
Centre for Creative Collaboration
University of London
16 Acton Street
London WC1X 9NG

Being a self-styled London translation pundit, I’d love to attend but, sadly, won’t be able to make it. Do let me know how it goes if you go…

“I’d be really careful about having any kind of a sensitive debate with someone either spoken or written using these translations.”

To be fair, this is not shock news. Google has always said this, or at least things along these lines. It is only others who have assumed that, as a Google product, Google Translate must be infallable. This assumption is a compliment to Google and their transformation of the way we use the internet. However the Google Translate help page says quite clearly:

“Even today’s most sophisticated software, however, doesn’t approach the fluency of a native speaker or possess the skill of a professional translator.”

That said, sometimes Google Translate is just plain wrong. I was recently looking at the Google Translation of a proposed car hire where it had translated Euros as US Dollars. Um, no, different currency … and a potential nasty shock at the hire desk!

In his recent comments (reported in today’s The Australian: “Search giant admits translations can be lacking”), Dr Cerf said there were problems with interpreting the meaning of the same phrase in British and American English, let alone phrases in different languages.

During his visit to The Australian‘s Sydney office last week, Dr Cerf added:

“If we were going from zero to 10, we would be about five, that’s better than almost everybody else.

“But I can tell you that I read newspapers from other countries by using Google Translate and at least I’m getting a pretty good gist of what’s being said and if I need to know more I’d go to a language speaker, an expert speaker.”

Needless to say, I’d second that.

As regular readers will know, this day celebrating translation was established in 1991 by the Fédération Internationale des Traducteurs (International Federation of Translators). Our translation agency, WorldAccent, is proud to be a memeber of one of the federated bodies, the Institute of Translation & Interpreting. The date of 30 September was chosen as it is the feast day of St. Jerome (347-420 AD), patron saint of translators, interpreters and librarians. The day celebrates and promotes translation as an essential activity in contemporary society – but one which too often remains invisible and ignored.

This year’s theme partly celebrates the incredible diversity of language around the globe. As the Federation note in their press release for International Translation Day 2010:

“The estimated six to seven thousand languages spoken around the globe are the repository of our collective memory and intangible heritage. But the linguistic and cultural diversity they offer is under threat: 96% of these languages are spoken by only 4% of the world’s population and hundreds of them will soon be lost forever.”

With that “variety of voices”, the need for “translation quality” becomes clear:

“Translators, interpreters and terminologists, indispensable as mediators in interlingual and cultural contexts, have a special responsibility to help preserve multilingualism and promote smooth interaction among all the world’s languages. The burgeoning growth in information technologies, the widening reach of the Internet, the expansion of trade globally and ever-increasing scientific and cultural cooperation have undoubtedly enhanced the role of translators, interpreters and terminologists in the modern world and ushered in a ‘time of plenty’. This has in turn increased the burden of responsibility on language professionals: their work must meet exacting standards of accuracy and quality yet lose none of the nuances of the original language.”

Also of interest is an event taking place to mark this year’s International Translation Day in London. It is organised by English PEN, which promotes “literature as a means of greater understanding between cultures”. The event will focus on the future of literary translation, with speakers including Boyd Tonkin, Simon Winder, Michael Kelly, Kirsty Dunseath, Sarah Ardizzone and Mark Thwaite.

To celebrate this day we have produced a free e-card to download for yourself, or to send to friends and colleagues.

Download the International Translation Day 2010 greeting card as a PDF (288Kb).

“On Monday, the Radio-Canada website ran a story criticizing the practice, arguing many of the automatic translations were of poor quality and that RCMP divisions elsewhere in the country offer instant official translations.”

I’ve pointed out before that if you want to communicate well, you need a human translator. This is even more true on a website than elsewhere. Afterall, once you have made available the machine translation into umpteen languages, how do you know if it simply causes bemusement for foreign language readers. Or even worse, hilarity. The Mounties are now looking into hiring a human translator.

It seems when it comes to French translation, « Vous en avez pour votre argent » – you get what you pay for.

image: Clerkenwell Design Week

This annual shindig describes itself as:

“a festival celebrating design’s creative richness, its social impact and its power for change.

The festival programme of seminars, workshops and debates tackles key issues from a design standpoint. Big design names and inspirational thought leaders will spearhead an event crammed with left-field thinking, off-the-wall performances and presentations to challenge all your preconceptions.”

Yesterday I grabbed the chance to look round the newly opened concept store from Toto, the Japanese luxury bathroom brand, and further down St John Street indulged in some light gazing.

One of the great bonuses of working in our central London translation office is being able to nip out to such celebrations. I’ll be trying to attend at least some more events in the next couple of days to cast my translation eye over them. Design is after-all an international force, although one often coloured by local tastes and aesthetics.