The telecom provider Telia has spent a lot of time and money on such statements. But their customers rate them at the bottom of the customer satisfaction scale (Markedsføring magazine, 23.03.10).
I visited a Telia store recently and became highly irritated with their service. They refused to bend a harmless rule to help fix a problem they themselves had created for me. The difficulty was one of having the wrong attitude toward their customers.
Leaving that store, I decided to sneak into another Telia store to see if they might be more flexible and the girl behind the counter helped me immediately. Her attitude made all the difference.
When people ask me to create a vision/mission that consists of a bunch of statements (something they often do), I just can’t see the value. And I typically advise them not to do it. Unless they do it right, that is…
There are essentially two types of vision/mission projects: The first are highly creative efforts that result in something most people like and think was worth it. They are the results of big, expensive processes and get implemented in companies like Carlsberg, LEGO or Nike. I can recommend them if you have the cash and time.
The second is the text-by-the-meter model where you write a lot of stuff from the company’s “We” perspective. That always results in paragraphs that you yourself would never read and which you therefore can’t expect others to want to read, either.
Without the big process, the only thing you can do is to string a lot of clichés together in prose – i.e. the second type. And that’s what we can do for you if you want us to, of course. It would take about 4-5 hours. No input is required – we just pull the clichés out of a rather worn old hat. Of course, I believe that it would be against any good brand to do so.
But there may be other internal or external pressures that require it to be done this way. The reason I’m so tough on this is that times have moved far away from long paragraphs of blowing the company’s own trumpet. People don’t believe it like they (maybe) used to. It’s just another sign that the company is not a leader – because leaders are action-focused, have a simple but powerful attitude, show that they know the customer’s time is short. Employees don’t get behind this stuff, either. They get motivated by the excitement of working with a company, not by management statements and rules.
It’s not about looking like everyone else, but about looking different in an interesting, exciting way. So let’s cut to what is really important. Let’s drop those stiff corporate statements that waste management time and no one can remember anyway. And let’s focus on expressing and living an attitude instead. So the answer is? Create an attitude with edge and express it via text, images and interactions. That works much better!
If you’re thinking of saving money on your next translation job - by using a low-cost agency or doing the work in-house - this article in the New York Times may make you think again.
As China opens its doors for Expo 2010, 600 volunteers are working to remove bad translations from signs, hotels and restaurants across the country. And they have their work cut out, removing signs such as Racist Park, Slip and Fall Down Carefully, and Do Drunken Driving.
But not everyone thinks that eradicating all Chinglish from China is a good idea. Jeffery Yoa feels that Chinglish can be refreshingly lyrical, and perhaps offers non-Chinese an insight into how the Chinese think of language. Still, even he draws the line because, as he says, “I want to see people nodding that they understand the message on these signs. I don’t want to see them laughing.”
Check out the article and make up your own mind - and be sure to watch the slide show.
English is of course widely spoken as a second language throughout the world - it’s a way for people from different backgrounds to communicate effectively in an international setting. Grammar rules are broken. Words are mispronounced. But people still understand one another. And now a retired French IBM marketing executive, Jean-Paul Nerrière, has given this pattern a name: Globish. He claims it’s “the worldwide dialect of the third millennium”.
Nerrière says that memorizing 1,500 English words and a song (he suggests “Strangers in the Night”), is all it takes to communicate in Globish. You won’t sound eloquent, but you’ll be understood. At least by non-native English speakers. And that’s the catch. Seems that native English speakers can’t understand a word of this English-based international language. Odd, no?
So does Nerrière have any ulterior motives for establishing Globish as a lingua franca? Well, he does claim that,”Globish will limit the influence of the English language [on French] dramatically.”
The New Oxford American Dictionary recently chose its word of the year. And what new word summed up the final year of this nameless decade? Unfriend. Fitting, no? The competition was stiff as the short list included a number of beloved words from technology and economics, such as ‘hashtag’, ‘intexticated’, ‘freemium’, and (a personal favorite) ‘zombie bank’.
So what about the word of the decade? Well, the Global Language Monitor (which, incidentally, now has the number of English words past the 1,000,000 mark) says the term ‘global warming’ was the most popular word of the decade. Apparently, ‘climate change’ was the ‘Top Phrase of the Decade’, which strikes me as odd since ‘global warming’ is also a phrase. But whatever. It’s all about the truthiness.
I’ve just read yet another recommendation on LinkedIn where someone said that their colleague could “think outside the box”. This must be one of the most common phrases in recommendations about people and in job ads. It’s become a cliché, and, as George Orwell and many other great communicators have said, you should use clichés with great caution. However, I also think it misses the point.
What people often mean is “come up with new ideas” or “think differently”. For people with even the slightest interest in creative thinking - and this is surely most people - then coming up with new ideas about anything that interests them is not hard. The challenge is coming up with ideas that are relevant and that have a good chance of actually working - if not tomorrow or next week, then in one, five or ten years. Whether it’s for an ad campaign, a business strategy, or a new product, a great visionary idea is one that might seem far-fetched, but the steps towards it are clearly definable and achievable.
For me, “thinking out of the box” is too simplistic and doesn’t imply the ability to understand fully the situation. So next time you’re preparing a job ad and you want to write that your new colleague should be to “think out of the box”, think again. What do you really want from them?
One of our good friends was lucky enough to go to last week’s Roskilde Festival, one of Europe’s biggest music festivals. Unfortunately, mass communications is not always at the forefront of organizers’ minds and a few amusing and confusing mistakes were spotted.
- Apparently, you could buy a burger with “ox meat” in it. (Danish: oksekød?!)
- There was a stall with washing machines that promotes washing clothes at 30 degrees and, unfortunately, (Novozymes should know better!) a big sign inviting people to do their “landry”. That one had us scratching our heads for a good few seconds.
- On another notice about the effects of global warming, some animals are apparently facing “extination”. Is that across between extinction and extermination?
Next to misplaced apostrophes (traditionally used by greengrocer’s to advertise banana’s), quotation marks are next on the list of punctuation that is thrown in generous handfuls at writing without any real idea why.
Most of the examples on Bethany Keeley’s blog seem to show that writers of posters and signs believe that quotes make their writing stand out - and so it does, but in completely the wrong way. But outside using it to show direct quotes, quotation marks are more correctly used to show ‘nonstandard, ironic, or other special sense’, according to the Chicago Manual of Style.
Which makes it all the funner when they are abused by people offering ‘food’ (what, you mean it isn’t really?). Or, like the picture here, a way out in case of ‘fire’ (no, go on you’re having a laugh).
Bizarre translations are always good fun, especially when they’re incredibly long and random. I just don’t even know where to begin with this one, but it does make me wonder what goes on in your typical Saigon park.
Just the other day I was watching a DVD from Hong Kong. The movie was of the typical Hollywood, English language variety. And it had subtitles. English ones… well, sort of. The words were English, but when strung together they made absolutely no sense. Occasionally you could pick out where the subtitles came together with the actual dialogue, but it took some effort. I couldn’t figure out why the movie didn’t have either Chinese subtitles or the original English ones.
So after reading the nonsensical bits of poetry for a few minutes, I think I figured it out. My hunch is that the movie originally had Chinese subtitles and someone translated these into English, literally. An example – an actor says “Warmongering?!” and the subtitle, believe it or not, reads, “You are warm hungry.” Turns out this already has a name – Engrish, which is basically a bad translation of another language (usually Japanese or Chinese) into English and, sometimes, a bad translation of English into another language followed by a (better) translation back into English.
I’ve even experienced this while watching English programs on Danish television – and those two languages have a lot more in common than English and Chinese! For example, I once read a subtitle that claimed a woman had just broken her window – when she’d just “cracked” it open. Which also begs the questions – do the people who write the subtitles even watch the video or do they just read the transcript? Isn’t context vital in understanding dialogue? And – how much really does get lost in translation?
Here are a few classic translation errors that’ll make you second guess the words at the bottom of your screen, or in your hotel lobby:
“Bite the wax tadpole.” – the original translation of Coca-Cola into Chinese.
“Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave.” – the “Pepsi Comes Alive” slogan translated into Chinese
“You are invited to take advantage of the chambermaid.” – a Japanese hotel’s guest directory from 1991
“It takes a virile man to make a chicken pregnant.” – a mistranslated Perdue chicken ad
