Lost in, or gained from, translation? (a trackback, again)

Dustless responded to my trackback with another stream of thoughs, and I though it'd be nice to sum it up a little up with how I feel about this subject matter.

Let's be honest, real and truthful translation is hardwork, and elegant translation doubly so. Culture differs, context changes, and people very naturally think and react very differently. In the true spirit of translation you're in essence trying to compress and embed the necessary information about these culture, history and context into the translated material, in attempt to repicate the emotional response on the reader's part.

Man, that's a though process, skill, and work.

Let's also face it, business people are amoungst the laziest people there is. The practice of business emphasize on efficiency, earning most with the least effort. This is the best reason I can come up with for the apparently bad translation quality.

And for my money, not all business's effort in moving brands over turns out bad. Not acedamicc top notch quality, sure, but half of them aren't all bad.

That being said, let's look at one really really bad example:

I'm loving it - mcdonalds
Although the original marketing catch-phase wasn't brilliant to begin with, it's fine. I can see an American saying that. Not often, but I can. Now, move that word-for-word into other languages, and becomes a pathetic attempt to bring something cool. I see the same phase in Mandarin, and then again in Cantonese. For anyone who doesn't understand American culture, the phase just doesn't make a lot of sense. For those who do? Man I can't remember laughing harder at a brand catch-phase ever. It simply doesn't work.

Why's this still going on if it doesn't work? Because Mcdonalds is too big to be brought down by mistakes like these. Marketing then would believe they're doing a good job, and keep doing the same thing. Vicious cycle I say.

The need to inovate
There are times when direct translating the brand for a coharent world-wide brand image at low cost just doesn't work. Companies very rarely take the bullet and create a new brand for a different area. Partially because inovation is hard in itself, and partly because business people are just lazy assess.

Perhaps It isn't so much "translation reflects culture" as opposed to "the need to translate relfects lack of inovation", at least in marketing.

I don't know, we never really hear a chinese translation of the name "google", have you?