Please dial 7 to retrieve your auto from the garbage

The headline is taken from a slide where Andy Atkins Kruger of WebCertain demonstrates the importance of having local people translating.

I moderated a session at SMX Stockholm last week called “Global Search Marketing Tactics” where I had Andy, Sara Anderson of Global strategies, Hannah Evershed from Isobar and Joost de Valk of One to Market.

Hannah, Sara and Andy all mentioned the importance of getting locals to translate to prevent mistakes Joost also rightly pointed out that boundaries even within countries where culture and dialects actually can play major roles when translating and or marketing within countries. Dialects versus languages, some suggested that the difference between dialects and languages was a army.

The speakers also covered the importance of understanding of search engine market share; while Google is dominant in most countries you can find countries in Europe like Iceland and Russia where Google has not been able to take total control. Andy also mentioned Google Universal search and the changes that it will make in multilingual marketing. Hannah talked about the importance of retaining local market knowledge, product & process.

All of the speakers talked about the difficulty of managing multilingual PPC campaigns where directly translated phrases from English to the likes of Finnish or Dutch posed problems. All of the speakers agreed on a statement Sara made that “global was complex” and she gave out great samples on that.

Here are couple of Sara’s pointers:

• Language issues and keywords
• Lack of education/adoption in the local areas
• Reduced resources [Company/Agency/Engine]
• Scale – more engines, reports, keywords
• Bid management complexities

Sara also gave a great sample of the impact in how the word notebook is searched for (or not search for) in couple of countries.
One point that both Andy and Sara made was that translators must understand search and how writing for the web can sometimes be different from writing for other media.

As a closure on this post and for fun I am throwing in one more of Andy’s great misspelling samples: “Why go somewhere else to be cheated when you can come here”

See you at SMX London on the 15th of November.

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Kristjan Mar Hauksson

Latest posts by Kristjan Mar Hauksson (see all)

• The rising need for linguistic adaptation - September 13, 2012
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