Case Study: Valerie Romley / Beyond Translation

As globalization marches on, more and more companies want to appeal to broader markets, domestic and foreign. It sounds easy enough, right? You’ve got a successful brand or ad campaign here in the United States, why can’t you just translate it to other countries and other cultures and watch your profits soar?

Not so fast, Valerie Romley counsels her clients, as well as her readers, in Beyond Translation, which I had the privilege to edit. She points out that you can’t just sell to people whose ethnicity or nation of origin is different from your own. You have got to understand who they really are, and how they differ culturally from the markets you have traditionally favored.

She brings a few hilarious examples of American companies that got it dead wrong when they tried to take their brands or ad campaigns to Mexico. Remember the Chevy Nova? Nova might sound like a neat name for a car in the United States.In Mexico, not so much because “no va” in Spanish means “doesn’t go.” Or what about the ubiquitous “Got milk?”campaign that was a staple of seemingly every highway billboard or magazine ad for years? Once again, marketers swung and missed when they took the “Got milk?” concept to Mexico. That is because the way they wrote “Got milk” inSpanish translated to … and you cannot make this stuff up … “Are you lactating?”

Valerie was fascinated by cultural differences after having lived and traveled abroad. She built her consultancy around South Asian, Latino, and East Asian communities. Her book guides readers on how to enter those markets around the world and how to understand individuals and communities from those regions who had come to settle here in the United States.

You would think that entities as big as GM or the Milk Board, or whoever sponsors the “Got milk?” campaign, would have had enough common sense to research these basic linguistic concepts before they spent millions, or tens of millions, embarrassing themselves for no reason when they took “no va” and “Are you lactating?” to Mexican consumers.

Alas, you would have been wrong. Valerie Romley to the rescue.