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There is a human story behind every business, because there is a human story behind every human.

Our story is one of humble beginnings. It all started more than a decade ago in the old garage of my octogenarian granddad-in-law. It was located on a hillside with million dollar views overlooking Brisbane city. My then husband and I did not pay rent, because we did not have money, so we shared granddad’s beautiful little Queenslander while also looking after him.

I was doing translations on an old desk next to a car and I also had a filing cabinet, which was empty. Hesitatingly, I had put my university degrees up on the wall. They looked out of place. But I needed them there, because I did not want to see the sceptical look on a client’s face again, when they came to drop off a document for translation. And so Absolute Translations’ journey began.

Unfortunately, not long after, my life turned upside down and I had to part from my little garage and my dear old granddad. As I had nowhere to go and no money to get there anyway, a French student of mine gave me a room in her home for a couple of months. These were times I will never forget. Sarah. A golden heart. There weren’t any city views, but it was what saved me.

I never returned to a garage, but these humble beginnings have shaped me and have made Absolute Translations to what we are today. We have never taken for granted the business that came our way and the trust that clients placed in us, and we never will. We are very proud of who we are and where we’ve come from, but we will never take you for granted.

Because without you and without your trust we wouldn’t be here today.

Sincerest Thanks.

Veerle

By Al Ries

Your Brand’s Name Might Be a Liability Once You Cross the Border

What’s the biggest change in marketing in the past 50 years?

You could make the case for the Internet. Or Big Data. Or mobile marketing. Or PR. Or celebrities. Or a number of other revolutionary developments.

But in our work as marketing consultants, we find the biggest change is the shift from national marketing to global marketing. Our clients are mostly focused on building global brands.

When brands cross borders
Problems can occur. Take the name of the brand. As long as a brand is a registered trademark in the countries you wish to do business in, you might assume everything is taken care of.

Not so. A name that works well in one country won’t necessarily work well in another country.

Take Kremlyovskaya, the No.1 vodka in Russia. Any vodka that is a leading brand in Russia should be a best seller on the global market. But it’s not. An English-speaking person cannot pronounce or spell a word like “Kremlyovskaya.”

English has become the second language of the world. Any brand designed for the global market needs to use a word English-speaking people can relate to.

Countries have positions, too
Russia is known for vodka. It’s not surprising that Smirnoff was founded in Moscow in the 1860s.

Smirnoff isn’t an English word, but it is a word English-speaking people can easily use and pronounce. Thanks in part to its Russian connection, Smirnoff is the best-selling vodka and the best-selling distilled spirit in the world.

In many ways, a country’s position is even stronger and longer lasting than a brand’s position. When a brand is in sync with its country of origin, the brand has a much better chance of being successful on the global market.

With the right name, of course.

When it comes to names, companies have options. There is no supreme authority that determines what a brand’s name has to be. Companies can always use different names in different countries.

Sometimes they have no choice. Kremlyovskaya is not “Kremlyovskaya” in the Russian language. It’s “Кремлевская,” because the Russian language uses the Cyrillic alphabet. So for many countries in the global market, every Russian brand name needs to be translated into the Latin alphabet.

And how do you do that? You try to find English letters to replicate the sounds of the Russian name. Hence, Kremlyovskaya.

That might be logical, but that’s not good marketing thinking. Countries like Russia which uses the Cyrillic alphabet and China which uses a picture language have a marketing advantage. Almost nobody will notice if they ignore their phonic names and create new brand names that will work on the global market.

“Red Square” vodka would have been my name for Kremlyovskaya.

Every language has unique sounds
You might not understand a language to understand what a person is trying to say. I don’t speak Spanish, but I can generally understand what a Spanish speaker is trying to say by his or her tone of voice.

Not so in China. In a half dozen visits to China, I still have no idea what a Chinese speaker is trying to say. Is he or she angry? Sad? Argumentative? Agreeable? Who knows? The Chinese language has many sounds no English speaker every uses.

Great Wall Motor, a leading Chinese automobile company, was planning on building a global brand with its SUV vehicle. The brand name in Chinese is 哈弗.

Initially, the sound of the name was translated into “Hover,” but that brand name could not be used globally because of trademark issues connected with the generic word “hovercraft.”

No problem. Instead of “Hover,” the company decided to use “Haval.” Today, Great Wall’s Haval brand is the largest-selling SUV brand in the Chinese market.

Both “Hover” and “Haval” are easy for English-speaking people to pronounce and spell. But these are exceptions. The English translations of most Chinese brand names are not going to work on the global market.

Take Snow beer, the largest-selling Chinese beer brand. The name is easy to pronounce, but its connotations are wrong.

Tsingtao, the second largest-selling Chinese beer, is a difficult brand name to pronounce and spell, one reason its distribution in America is primarily limited to Chinese restaurants.

If they want to be big successes on the global market, both brands could use different names.

Germany is known for beer
The largest-selling beer brand in Germany should be a global best seller. But it’s not.

Warsteiner? How could a German brand name starting with “War” become a best-selling global brand? Unlikely.

Why not give the brand a different name on the global market that it has on the domestic market?

That’s exactly what the country has done. Germany in Germany is “Deutschland.” Germany in Spain is “Alemania.” Germany in Sweden is “Tyskland.”

Many countries follow similar patterns.

Albania in Albania is “Shqipëia.

Austria in Austria is “Österreich.”

Hungary in Hungary is “Magyarország.”

Poland in Poland is “Polska.”

Spain in Spain is “España.”

Sweden in Sweden is “Sverige.”

Turkey in Turkey is “Tükiye.”

Names can be persuasive
Consumers assume names have literal meanings. When a motorist sees a sign that says “Lakeview Drive,” the motorist assumes that somewhere on that road is a view of a lake.

Marketing people can take advantage of the consumer’s inherent belief in the truthfulness of a name. “Otherwise, why would they have called it Lakeview Drive?”

But the meaning of a name can change depending on the language involved. So in building global brands, you need to make sure your name works in the language of the countries you plan to do business in.

Many corporate executives have an emotional attachment to the names of their brands and hate changing them. In particular, we have had many discussions with Chinese companies over the need to modify their names to make them more effective on the global market.

But changing a name is a difficult decision for many executives. After one frustrating meeting on this subject, the head of our Shanghai affiliate said to me, “By the way, did you know the name of our country is not China?”

“No, I didn’t. What is the name of your country?”

“Zhong Guo.”

By Al Ries on Advertising Age

Al Ries is chairman of Ries & Ries, an Atlanta-based marketing strategy firm he runs with his daughter and partner Laura.

Forget Amis, McEwan and the Booker winner — these are the best novels of 2014.

by Tim Martin

The year’s really interesting fiction took little for granted, questioned established structure and kept the reader perpetually off balance.

– Jenny Offill’s very funny, very sad Dept of Speculation (Granta) charted the breakdown of a marriage in fragments and epithets – “My plan was never to get married. I was going to be an art monster instead” – that cluster and occasionally cohere; if it’s a novel, it is one whose atomic bonds have been mysteriously, intriguingly loosened.

– Lars Iyer’s fascinating Wittgenstein Jr (Melville House) offered up a doomy, hilarious, thoughtful Cambridge comedy with a tone somewhere between Philosophical Investigations and Porterhouse Blue, as a bunch of dreadful modern undergrads struggle to make sense of a tragic, saintlike tutor who is not Wittgenstein, or not exactly.

– And Will Self continued his unapologetically modernist project with Shark, a prequel to last year’s Umbrella that whipped its babble of 20th-century voices into a monstrous white squall of a book, weaving in and out of the troubled minds of its characters (war veterans, drunks, unscrupulous psychiatrists) with terrible commanding élan. One page of this stuff looks terrifying; two and you’re hooked.

Other adventures in form proved similarly interesting.

– Paul Kingsnorth’s The Wake (Unbound) was not just the first crowdfunded work to enter the Booker longlist, but also an experiment in language on the order of Riddley Walker and A Clockwork Orange. Set in 1066 and written in a warped pseudo-Saxon English (“Loc it is well cnawan there is those wolde be tellan lies and those with only them selfs in mynd”), it was the first historical novel for ages where the action really seemed to be taking place somewhere else.

– The ferociously prolific American novelist Dave Eggers completed a three-year satirical trilogy with Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever? (Hamish Hamilton), a novel-in-dialogue in which a lunatic kidnaps his way up the American chain of national command until he finds someone to give him a straight answer.

– From France, Emmanuel Carrère contributed Limonov (Allen Lane), which built a compelling novelistic narrative around the true biography and tall tales of a Russian prankster, author and politician.

– Meanwhile, Howard Jacobson’s nasty satirical dystopia J managed the frightening, quixotic feat of writing a book about a second Holocaust without mentioning the J-word at all.

– Ali Smith’s irrepressibly clever prose is one of the more reliable delights in current British fiction, and How To Be Both (my pick for the Booker, alas) wound sneakily around big questions of gender, politics and art while managing to read like a cold drink on a hot day. It had a cunning gimmick too: half the print run was flipped so that the segment about a Renaissance artist preceded the one about a contemporary teenager, or vice versa. You’d have to read it to know why this was significant, but the technique carried an echo of an older typographical curiosity that saw print this year.

– Originally conceived in 1966, Tristano (Verso), by the Italian writer Nanni Balestrini, could only appear as its author intended in the era of print-on-demand, where its sentences were shuffled so that each book represented one of 109,027,350,432,000 unique variants. It’s an absurd experiment, of course, but, like a Burroughs cut-up, mine managed none the less to be drifting, impressionistic and oddly compelling. Yours might be different.

In fact, experimental novels seemed to be everywhere, some more successful than others.

– I hugely got on with Siri Hustvedt’s The Blazing World (Sceptre), a cryptic, polyphonic novel about art and feminism in which a female sculptor publishes her work under a series of male aliases, but I had more furious arguments about it than any novel this year, which, I suspect, is what Hustvedt was going for in the first place.

– Karl Ove Knausgaard’s gigantic confessional project My Struggle hit something of a bump with Volume 3, Boyhood Island (Harvill), which receded from the écorché honesty of the previous two volumes towards a rather safer tale of the author’s Scandinavian childhood.

– Timur Vermes’s Look Who’s Back (MacLehose) was a transgressive success in the author’s native country, but this cartoonish comedy, in which Hitler is reincarnated in Merkel’s Germany and becomes a YouTube sensation, looked rather pallid in a place that’s been mocking the chap since the early Thirties.

– Rachel Cusk’s frosty prose is an acquired taste, but the insidious weirdness of her short novel Outline (Faber) isn’t easily dismissed. As a snarl of reported speech encircled its almost wholly silent protagonist, I took to imagining her as a giant eyeball on legs, though in fact she’s supposed to be a writer teaching a workshop in Greece.

– In the concise and moving End of Days (Portobello), meanwhile, the German writer Jenny Erpenbeck made swift work of the one-life-multiple-outcomes conceit touched on by Kate Atkins, David Mitchell (and, this year, by Claire North’s reincarnation fantasia The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August) – and was, I think, the best of the bunch.

There were more traditional pleasures on offer.

– Richard Powers’s Orfeo (Atlantic) mixed forbidding current themes – bio-hacking, the American politics of fear – with the passion for classical music that has been latent in his work since The Time of Our Singing, and was the best thing he’s done in years.

– Peter Carey’s Amnesia (Faber) yoked Assange-era computer hacking with an Australian political conspiracy from the Seventies, and looks tamer in summary than it proved in practice as its dubious, drunken narrator went further and further off-message with his story.

– Zia Haider Rahman’s compendious, occasionally hectoring debut In the Light of What We Know (Picador) was the year’s most interesting first novel, gobbling up ideas and talking points – the financial crisis, the developed and developing worlds, war, terrorism, philosophy, maths – with the avidity of a combine harvester.

– I also loved the painstaking first half of Sarah Waters’s The Paying Guests (Virago), a gay novel set in Modernism’s great year of 1922, and was just looking forward to an expansion of its deft insights into class and gender when the whole thing collapsed into a not-very-surprising thriller.

– The late French writer Robert Merle, whose Fortune de France series of 16th-century swashbucklers has sold millions of copies in his homeland, was translated into English for the first time in The Brethren (Pushkin, £12.99).

– And though I’ve been a fan for years of the small masterpieces of unease that Robert Aickman called his “strange stories”, I was knocked flat by the offbeat humour and lightness of touch in his first novel The Late Breakfasters, republished by Faber. If David Lynch had done Downton, this might be the result.

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Original article by Tim Martin in The Telegraph