For your laugh and dropped jaw of the day, check out this post from Gawker about a Japanese department store’s—well, let’s say unconventional—promotional campaign.
While this is pretty much your worst-case translation scenario, translation issues are by no means confined to accidental swear words. Working with international clients, we’ve found that marketing in different languages is something you always have to be cognizant of—or garbled meanings and timeline issues will rear their ugly heads.
Make sure you have a reliable source providing the copy for each language you’re working with. We’ve used both native-speaking clients and professional translation companies and have been happy with the results. Also, you need to factor the time and cost for translation into your timeline and budget. If you’re printing a short eight-page brochure, translation probably won’t be a major hurdle. But if you’re designing a 200-page product catalog, with thousands of individual product descriptions, address translation at the beginning of the project—or you can quickly find yourself months behind schedule and with thousands of dollars in unforeseen costs.
