Asian Languages

Here is an old story. Unfortunately, it still happens a lot.

A company asked me to translate a brochure into 5 languages. Which five? Whatever their current customer speak the most.

So, I reviewed their customer profile. There was no language information. Why? They thought it was legal issue. In fact, although the law says you can't ask people ethnicity background, it doesn't say you can't ask your customers their preferred communication languages.

How about the diversity survey the company had done some time ago? That should help. Let's see. Here was the customer ethnicity breakdown: x% African American, y% Hispanic and z% Asian American. Sir, please note that while all Hispanics speak Spanish, Asians speak a million different languages.

Could we review the customer's last name? Sure, but there were tens of thousands of customers.

Final solution: Review where the Asian American customers are. Compare it to Asian subgroup population. Then, make an intelligent guess.

There is another easy alternative: Just pick the top foreign languages Asian American depend the most – Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese. FYI, most South Asian, Filipino and Japanese speak English well.

Asian Media Planning and Buying

In Media Planning 101, students learn about Rating, GRP, CPM, CPP and so. They plan base on MRI and Nielsen data. While these techniques are useful, it does work for Asian media planning. Why? Because we don't have syndicated research data like MRI and Nielsen and that only a few Asian American publications are ABC audited.

Adding to the fact that the market is very diversified, Asian media planning is indeed extremely challenging. It is very difficult for general market media agencies (who are from the traditional schools) to manage. To deal with Asian media portion, they have three options:

• Put together a very basic plan and buy for some level of awareness. There are few major media in each market/segment. Just buy some full-page ads or 60-second spots on premium position/time would not be too wrong.


• Outsource it. Pretend you have the capabilities in-house but actually let your affiliates do it. Form a different agency with the affiliate in case the affiliate has existing client(s) that have conflict of interest.


• Let go. Admit you are not ready and ask client's Asian agency to do it.

Most of my clients have their general market media agencies handle all diversity media plan and buy, except Asian. But it is not easy for them to let go and keep letting go. I believe it is the nature of business –- people try to have it all.

Before you decide which option you or your agency should take, see my other Asian Marketing blog entries on my experience working with general market agencies when I worked for an Asian publication.

• IBM -- Traditional vs Simplified Chinese
• McDonald's -- Language Difference
• IKEA -- English Ad On Chinese Newspaper

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Globalization

Crossover between general and diversity creative works because most of the time they are built on the same platform. In fact, most major global brands set up one platform for all regions and ethnicities. Localization allowed with all must be tie to the same theme.

The "Your Point of View" campaign of HSBC is one of the examples. Its print creative shows alternate images with attached "labels", showing how different people can have various points of view on the same issue. TV and radio creative are based on the same theme. Depending of the regions and ethnicities the ads are presenting to, different sets of "labeled images" apply. It works globally. McDonald’s "I’m loving it" and Dove’s "Real Beauty" other examples.

Some of the platforms, however, cannot be just translated to other markets literally. Take Chevy’s "An American Revolution" as an example. While American Revolution could symbolize the transformation of the all-new Chevy in a very positive way, it means nothing to Asian immigrants. Focus group further confirmed Chinese are scared by the word "revolution." It reminded them the painful history of the Chinese Cultural Revolution in the 1960’s. Thus, Chevy’s Asian marketing agency came up with the modified line "New Era" for Chevy’s Chinese American market. "New Era" perfectly translated the spirit behind "An American Revolution" without bringing up the American and/or Chinese history.

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Traditional vs Simplified Chinese

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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Language Difference

The Asian-American immigrants bring more languages to the US than perhaps all other population segments combined. Just India alone, there are fifteen different languages. Not to mention the multiple dialects spoken by the various subgroups.

While Chinese has tens of dialects (Mandarin and Cantonese are the major two), the written form is the same. They all share the same set of Chinese characters and have the same grammar logics. (FYI, there are more than 10K Chinese characters, but you only need to know ~2500 to comprehend regular newspaper.)

Just like English, however, there are some language variations among regions. Ask for soda and French fries in London will not get you what you expect in New York. Same for Chinese, the fuel we feed the cars is called "gas oil" in Mainland China but "electric oil" in Hong Kong. The situation is further complicated for terms introduced by foreigners. Salad is an example; there are at least five different combinations of the Chinese characters to translate the term phonetically.

Years ago when McDonald's tried to promote its salad to Chinese customers, they gave out couples as pre-print insert to some Chinese newspapers. The Chinese translation they used for the term salad unfortunately was not the most popular used one. If only there were no product pictures, many readers would have no clues what it was about. I later found out that the agency just hired a freelancer for translation. No one at the agency or the client side was able to comment before the insert was printed.

Take away for marketers, especially those do Asian marketing: Don’t rely on one freelance for any translation and copywriting in any language that you are not familiar with.

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