In my last blog post "Language Difference", I mentioned Chinese share the same set of Chinese characters and have the same grammar logics. Actually, there are two sets – traditional and simplified.
Traditional Chinese characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong and Macau. Mainland China and Singapore use the simplified Chinese characters developed by the PRC government in the 1950s and finished in 1964.
Majority of the Chinese publications in the US are printed in traditional Chinese. There are two reasons: 1) Traditional Chinese has longer history and is considered as the standard written form of the language. 2) Simplified Chinese users could easily guess the traditional characters right and pick up the new form easily; but not vice versa. All the language dialects and forms could be confusing to non-Chinese. But marketers must be aware of the difference.
I recall I received two IOs from IBM during the time I worked for a Chinese newspaper. Both had language related mistakes.
First insertion was in 2003. The creative has an Asian face but copy was all in English. I offered the agency to translate it at a minimal fee. They accepted but it took them forever to approve my translation. I suspect they had hard time finding someone to evaluate the translation quality.
The next one I received about a year later was not much better, Chinese face and Chinese copy – but in simplified characters. It took me hours to explain to the agency the difference between traditional and simplified characters and that our paper is in traditional. The agency decided to have their Chinese office in Beijing to convert it.
Don't assume agencies in China are professional in Chinese language. The revised creative I received had two mistakes. Since my agency contact didn't know Chinese at all, she asked if I could contact their Chinese team in Beijing directly. I did, but several back-and-forth emails didn’t work out. We later had a conference call in their morning time and my nighttime. It turned out that their Beijing office didn’t have the right font typeface of those particular characters in traditional form. I had to do it for them!
Take away for marketers: Make sure your agency has the local expertise to manage your target segments. While some work may be outsourced to overseas, it is the local team that serves us your eyes and ears. This applies not only Asian marketing, but all diversity marketing.
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