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Chabuduo. Or is it?

If I am an Australian consumer of a Chinese product, do I care that the accompanying literature is written in broken English?

“It must have been hard to translate. I understand the basic gist. No worries.”

But then someone else might wonder why a producer does not make a bigger effort, if they could positively influence their export success?

In a world where brand loyalty and storytelling are intimately connected, what was a compelling story in the original language, can easily become uninspiring drivel if the same care isn’t taken with the translation. The consumer will simply move on to another brand whose story is more carefully crafted.

There is no place for shoddy translations ruining corporate stories anymore. Well, not for the brands that care about their customers, anyway.

Your audience

I have written before about the difference between translation and transcreation, and the essence is found in this thought: a transcreation must make the target audience feel the same way as the original article made the original audience feel.

Let’s take an advertisement. The purpose of an advertisement is to attract the attention of people towards a product or service, and to ultimately move those people to purchase that product or service.

An advert that leaves you feeling amused, should also leave a new audience feeling amused, if translated. Different cultures demand different approaches and if a literal, word for word translation won’t achieve the desired customer response, then a transcreation method should be adopted.

It’s all about your market and your audience. Who are they, what moves them, and how can you capture their attention?

If you are exporting, you must translate your content properly, with due regard to your audience, or you don’t do it at all.

An “okay” result risks turning off a vast swathe of your consumers who are used to being wooed.

Chàbuduō

In China, there is the concept of something being “close enough is good enough.” They even have a word for it: chàbuduō. But whenever I read an inadequate piece of writing I somehow feel that a precious moment in my life has been wasted. Why should I spend more time trying to work out what they are trying to say? If they want to attract my attention, should they not make more of an effort?

Inelegant messaging and clumsy language might suggest a deeper malaise.

And yes, it might be a translation, but there is no excuse for it not to make sense.

Apple are held up as a shining example in many respects, and their corporate messaging is no exception. Their customers might read their literature in hundreds of different languages, but they all come away feeling the same things. Apple know that each individual translation has a life of its own – it is the end customer and not the original writer who holds the key to the success of any piece of translated content.

When a company puts a piece of writing (or any other kind of content) out into the world, they do so in the full knowledge that it will be judged.

Why wouldn’t you want to write it as well as possible?

By Veerle Vanderplasschen

Creative Translation: When Creativity Alone Is Not Enough

Once a word is printed or appears on a screen, it is open to interpretation.

Choosing the right word is a creative act, because writing is subjective and there are many word choices to pick from to convey the right message. Understanding the impact of these words on the other hand, is a more logical and rational process. Who will be reading them? What is their cultural background? How would they understand these words?

It is common knowledge that we use the left side of our brains to make creative decisions – and many of these decisions are put out there for the world to judge. An artist paints a picture, a writer pens an article, or a musician composes a tune. All of these artistic acts take place with an audience in mind, but it is rare that they are specifically tailored towards being interpreted in a certain way. In these types of creative activity, the left brain rules.

When reason has to shape the path of your creativity, things get decidedly trickier. You might even ask whether creativity in a straightjacket can be called creativity anymore?

Translation is one industry where initial creativity has to be tempered with sound logic.

The logical right part of our brain has to keep the left brain in check, but for the best possible translations, it cannot snuff out the creative part of the brain altogether.

Especially when transcreating for an international purpose, you have to consider the logical conclusion of how a piece of writing will be understood. Translation software can come up with some fantastic creative choices (yes, robots can be creative too), but actually it is only the native translator who will read through a passage and ask:

Does this make sense? Will the audience understand what we want them to understand?

Great translation starts with creativity and finishes with logic.

Conveying a message to a Chinese audience in China requires different idioms in your message than conveying the same message to a Chinese audience in Australia. You come up with a creative solution, but at the end of every piece of work you have to ask that simple question. How will my intended audience understand these words? If you can’t come up with an objective and informed answer, you will have to go back to the drawing board.

As an owner of an international translation agency, I need to stay close to my clients so that I understand what their intentions are and what they want their words to achieve. In a way, I have to become an extension of my clients and pick translation teams that my clients would trust.

The reason is simple: our international teams of translators and revisers are entrusted with the most important task of all, and that is to translate and revise to the best of their ability and to make the logical decision of whether a translation will be suitable for its intended audience.

This is a key consideration when we talk to clients – we have to understand their audience and how they want them to be impacted. Without this understanding, we will be translating in the dark – our left brains might enjoy it, but our right brains won’t have a clue what is going on.

At the end of the day, logic is what ensures that a translation is as good as it can be.

Veerle Vanderplasschen

How to Win the Hearts of Local People? Localise.


In a world of mega brands reaching out to all corners of the world, you might assume that their core message will be equally well-received no matter where they are.

There is a simple reason why in Thailand McDonald’s mascot, Ronald McDonald, greets Thai people in the traditional “wai” gesture of both hands pressed together. This equally applies to their menus: despite the ubiquity of the BigMac they still need to cater to local tastes. I’m sure that when the U.S. bosses of McDonald’s were looking to enter Thailand, they won’t have done it from behind their comfortable desks in the U.S. They will have done considerable market research on the ground, and they will have employed local management alongside their own people to get the business launched.

If you enter a new market with a “this is who we are, take it or leave it” sledgehammer attitude, a few nasty surprises might lie in wait (and maybe even a few laughs at your expense).

The same applies to localising a message for a particular market. You can employ a translator who natively speaks the language but doesn’t live in the country you’re targeting, but will your message capture the idiomatic subtleties it does in the original language? If a native translator can’t naturally keep abreast of all the small cultural changes in their native language ‘back home’, there are all sorts of cultural inferences which a more mechanical translation might miss entirely.

The internet is littered with such translation mishaps, and there is nothing more important than ensuring that your message passes the “local” test first.

When they use language in any guise, the best brands stand out in their attention to this detail. When you are reading something that sounds like it has been written by “one of you,” there will automatically be a higher level of trust than if it has been literally (but not culturally) translated by someone who hasn’t given much thought to localisation.

We employ exclusively local translators who are focused on one thing: how will the translation sound to their neighbour, to their friends, to their colleagues? What would they think when they read the words? If these thoughts are the same as the thoughts of readers in the original language, then the job has been done. This might involve some creative license, and this is something that translators pride themselves in deploying, so brands (end clients) should trust the locals on the ground to get it right for them.

Here comes the crunch: this requires a considerable amount of trust. When any message is being changed for any reason, the originators of the message naturally want to ensure that it retains its meaning. This is entirely natural, and in a way, it illustrates my point perfectly. It is better to have a discussion about getting a localised translation 99% perfect than not bother to localise it at all and have 30% of the local population get the wrong idea.

Localisation is important, and it is key to the art of translation in our global world.

Veerle Vanderplasschen, Managing Director

The One Thing That Could Set You Apart from Your Competitors

Shop fronts

Shutterstock (Mayrum)

The central goal of any service industry is clear – have you done the job that your client has paid you to do? Whether it is finding them a new employee, putting on an event, or, in our case, accurately translating various pieces of content, there is outwardly very little that matters apart from the quality of the result.

Time and cost are two key variables in the quality equation, and technology is helping to reduce both to a bare minimum, but I can’t help thinking whether there is another more intangible aspect at work. An aspect that robots won’t be able to replicate quite so easily….

What role do relationships play in ensuring excellence?

Some might view translation as a mechanical task, replacing words and phrases from one language with words and phrases from another language, but in my experience far from every translation is so simple. 98% of the work might be routine, but it is in that last 2% that the essence of the work is found. Translators spend the vast majority of their time honing and perfecting that 2% – and they are only able to do it if they truly care about their clients.

For me, caring about clients doesn’t only mean wanting to do the best job for them, it also means asking the difficult questions and challenging them when required. If you want to do the best possible job, you need to be steered in the right direction, and although you might not want to “bother” the client, it is during these sometimes difficult conversations that we get to know each other. It would be easy to decide not to ask the questions (and go with the safe answers), but the end product may well suffer as a result.

Relationships grow from a place of mutual exploration, and excellence is born when we decide to go that crucial extra mile (even though we are often not sure where it will lead).

The capacity to be passionate and seek to go above and beyond the call of duty is something that is uniquely human, and for anyone working in the service industries, it is what will save us from the rise of the machines. When we are dealing with others, it is rare that events happen according to a set plan – there are always tangents, about-turns, and dead-ends. Success lies in how we choose to react to these events.

The best reactions come from a place of caring.

I am so lucky to have worked with many fantastic clients over my translation career and as I have built up my company I have always sought to keep a few key clients close to me so that I don’t forget about the importance of caring working relationships. There is something incredibly gratifying about investing your soul in a project and then hearing the gushing praise of a client at the end. Somehow it makes it all worthwhile, and you give of your very best when the next 2% challenge comes along.

There is something magical about being passionate about your work. It can’t be measured, and it even defies description, but I hope that it is what sets Absolute Translations apart.

by Veerle Vanderplasschen

How Translation Will Survive the Robot Onslaught

Illustration of artificial intelligence besides brains in jars

Credit DepositPhotos: Illustration of artificial intelligence besides brains in jars

by Veerle Vanderplasschen

The translation industry, like countless others, is threatened by the rise of the robots.

On the face of it, translation is one of those mechanical activities that could easily be handled by a nifty piece of Artificial Intelligence. Google Translate is just the start, imperfect as it is, and it wouldn’t be surprising if even the most qualified translator has had a peek on Google before to refresh their memory.

Of course, we also use A.I.; every reputable translation company uses technology to improve quality and increase efficiency to speed things up. You see, when someone needs a translation, they usually need it in a hurry.

However, they also need it to make sense to the reader.

In an increasingly globalised world, that reader might be from South Korea, Switzerland or Surinam. They expect any communication to be concise and adapted for their understanding. A text can be translated mechanically, but unless there is a degree of cultural adaptation, it will utterly lose its soul. Only a human with an intimate knowledge of the source and target cultures can ensure this.

This adaptation and recreation of the original is called transcreation.

It is a blueprint for how humans across many industries will survive the robot onslaught.

You see, a key aspect of a great translator’s arsenal is the ability to fill in the gaps and create something uniquely perfect. A robot could translate a Shakespearean sonnet from English to Japanese, but I very much doubt that it would retain the original beauty. That would take hours of careful consideration from only the most skilled translator (who writes Japanese poetry in their spare time).

Creatively filling in the gaps is what humans do best.

In communication terms, the deeper meaning is often found in what is left unsaid; unspoken inferences weaving their magic and taking a message to a whole new level.

In terms of different industries, the parallels are striking. The legal industry is a minefield of jargon that could be swiftly dealt with by an A.I. bot, but ask it to comfort a confused divorcee or aggrieved company owner, and it will struggle. Hospitality is another example where a robot can book us into a hotel, but only the warm farewell from a receptionist will send us on our way with a smile on our faces.

The subtleties of human experience ensure that the human experience will always trump the robot one.

The history of our workplace has been one of adaptation and adoption of new technologies. However, no matter how streamlined the process, the very best results are achieved with a sprinkling of humanity to add the cherry on top. Life is short and every day is precious, so why would we choose to live without that cherry? That is what a life with A.I. would look like – very easy, almost effortless, but with little to truly savour.

To me, translation is about remaining as true as possible to the original, but in every piece of work, we also have to remain as true as possible to the reader.

This tightrope is something that A.I. will never be able to tread.

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