Have you ever had undesirable results from a translation ? One common pitfall is to use the nearest translator and not the best positioned, in particular BCM's experience is that the use of a native speaker is particularly important to get the right results. Over to APT to explain...

Languages are very complex and only well-educated native speakers know all the idioms and grammar, and can write in a style that is correct, fluent, follows standard usage, but can also be creative if necessary, and avoids ambiguities. Most languages have more complex grammar than English, and a foreigner will probably waste a lot of time looking in dictionaries and grammar books, checking whether he or she has used the right spelling, case, gender, verb form or inflection, while a native speaker will usually write the correct form immediately.

Very often, a dictionary will have the word you need, but not the expression or phrase you need. There are many set patterns of words which have to be used, and no dictionary can list all of these. Only an educated native speaker knows which verbs you can use with which nouns, for example, you can ‘write / compile / produce / draw up a report’, but you can’t ‘do / compose / construct / build a report’.

Only a native speaker knows all the slang and possible double meanings of words.For example, a description of a number of people sitting and reading in the reference section of the national library in Paris said that ‘the readers were spaced out at regular intervals’. Instead of simply saying that the room wasn’t very full, this also suggests that these people often take mind-expanding drugs.

After studying a foreign language at school and college for years, most people can only read it well. They won’t speak it or write it like a native unless they have spent years living in the foreign country, using the foreign language all the time. Most foreigners who speak English fluently after living in England for years still speak with an accent, and make more mistakes in writing than in speaking simple sentences. Most documents sent for translation are far more complex than simple greetings and chatting about what you did last weekend.

A foreigner who has studied English for 10 years, living here for half that time, may have a level of ability in English similar to that of a 10-year-old native speaker. Their spoken English is quite fluent, but their attempts to write a legal, technical or financial document would be laughable if they tried, and very often they would not realise what howlers they are making. If you know some technical terms, you might be able to understand a technical text, but you need more knowledge of the subject to formulate sentences that use the right terms in the right way.

An Italian trying to write English, for example, will often assume that a literal translation of the Italian words will be correct, and a dictionary will often give this impression, sometimes only offering a literal equivalent, or listing various options and the non-native speaker won’t know which is right. An Italian might think that the ‘Ministerio dei Alimenti’ should be the ‘Ministry of Alimony’ for example, since that will sound right to him, an official-sounding term, and the dictionary says ‘Alimenti’ = ‘Food; alimony’, but of course it should be the ‘Ministry of Food’.
Another government department is the ‘Ministerio della Sanita / Salute’, for which the ‘Ministry of Sanity / Salvation’ may appear to be a correct English translation to an Italian, but that is in fact the ‘Ministry of Health’ / ‘Ministry of Public Heath’.

There is a particular problem with Italian, Spanish and French, with which the English language shares so many words with the same Latin origin, but they have quite different meanings or usage in English (‘false friends’), and if just one word is wrongly translated, the whole sentence can become meaningless. We also have many words of Germanic origin in English too, and the meanings have often changed.

With unrelated languages, there will also be problems with words that have several meanings in either language, so there is very often no one-for-one matching of terms in the different languages. Almost every word has connotations or associations, and only the native speaker is really familiar with these. Set phrases are often quotes from a work of literature, a standard legal or religious text, or maybe a popular song or TV programme. The non-native speaker will be implying and referring to all sorts of things without realising it.

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The apparently poor state of industrial marketing in Europe for a number of years has been a source of despair for magazines - most of which derive their almost all of their income from advertising sales - and for magazines editors who were often forced to work in isolation without the traditional support of junior assistants and full time journalists.

This is largely the result of a downturn in the manufacturing and process industries and various government and tax controls. In the meanwhile, public relations was maturing as a discipline. This meant increased awareness of PR as a form of marketing communications, and more reason to use it in the absence of astronmical advertisign budgets.

These two trends have resulted in companies focussing more effort on PR, an abbreviation for both public relations and press releases. Many companies, driven by the quest for an immediate return and justification produce only the latter, whereas even a well written, well targetted press release is weak in isolation.

Modern public relations is about strategy, and how tactics integrate into that strategy. BCM's US partners Tiziani Whitmyre have recently published a white paper entitled The Five Deadly Sins of B2B Marketing on how to avoid common pitfalls and get the most out of PR.

Needless to say that advertising is not a waste of time and should be encouraged as part of a long term strategy! More on strategy, PR and industrial marketing coming soon.

Google News is still in an experimental, or what you might call "beta" state. If you are lucky enough to get news on a site which is a Google News source such as www.ballard.co.uk, then you might find it gets listed under an appopriate category - in our line of work this is invariably "technology".

One of the problems with RSS, both for editors and for information consumers, is that there are lots of RSS feeds to subscribe to on any topic from Intimidating Technology to Automation or "my mate's Psychic Development blog" (we have no affiliation to this blog!).

No matter what the topic, a Google News style grouping or "clustering" algorthim could be very useful indeed. It seems that the PR blog, Micropersuasion has discoved such a system in development from Yahoo! This would, of course be tricky for personal blogs which by their very nature can cover a wide range of topic from UK space to what spin doctors do in their spare time.

The world awaits super-clever coding from (or at least bought out by) the likes of Yahoo! and Google to solve this riddle! In the meanwhile, we'll keep you posted on the developments.

The IT world has been talking about RSS and XML until they are blue in the face, but the broader community has been slower to catch on. In particular IT publishers and bloggers use RSS extensively. As a technically proficient communications agency, we have harnessed the technology for the purpose of news distribution and syndication. General purpose newswires such as PR Web have since independently recognised the potential of RSS for use by the press.

Recognise these?



An "XML" or "RSS" icon is there to advertise the fact that a feed is available to subscribe to, the BBC Telegraph and IT Analysis all have great feeds to subscribe to. Note that these aren't supposed to look good in a web browser but to be viewed using a special reader or aggregator (more about these later).

Since World War 2, public relations in Europe has developed from a “public information” approach adopted by governments where press releases are the sole point of contact with the media to a more interactive relationship. This push of information is still common, but the inquisitive journalist will seek the information they require. With the RSS aggregators [readers] available today, they can search recent news headlines and open up the information that they require.

The internet has revolutionised communications, new media re-writing the rules for public relations. For the first time, anyone with an internet connection can actively seek information on a topic. For us, RSS the natural evolution from an information push to the provision of timely and relevant news.

When I upload PR to our BCM virtual press office, it is automatically pushed onto the relevant RSS feed for clients or editors to view.

Clients love RSS, because they can keep their distributors and their own internal marketing team updated just by getting them to subscribe to the relevant RSS feeds. They can also add up to date news to their website without wasting valuable time maintaining their own press room. I have used our test website Engineering News to demonstrate this. Ugly, but neat I would say.

RSS feeds complete our system, now the news that is sent to editors also pops up on the first page of search engines like Google during the same week. What use is a press room if your “news” is only updated every 6 weeks like typical web pages?

More about this and podcasts later...

Translation is a challenge in technical and industrial organisations, due to the specialist nature of a your company's product or ...   more »