Image courtesy of wordwealthy.com

Earlier this week I enjoyed reading a post called ‘The Most Overused Buzzwords and Marketing Speak in Press Releases’ over at Adam Sherk’s blog (discovered courtesy of @Betti_Moser). Reading the post, it really struck me that high ‘bleurgh’ factor buzzwords like synergy, and dynamic tend to rear their ugly heads in languages other than English, too.

When I translate French press releases into English, for example, I can usually see straight away that the ‘bleurgh’ factor could be reduced by about 70%. The tone of French press releases is often a lot more gushing and flowery than you’d normally see in English, so that’s one challenge. But the individual words themselves present a second, delicious challenge.

Synergie and dynamique are of course words with French origin, but do they really mean anything in either language, or are they just linguistic padding? I suspect that in both languages they are used in marketing texts to give the reader a warm fuzzy feeling about the product or service being sold. In fact, here’s an aside thought: how true would it be to say that use of these words in English marketing texts is to some extent a result of unimaginative translationease creeping into English? We’re all guilty of letting these words slip in, they’re part of our collective marketing vocabulary, and to a large extent we expect to see them. But we could probably all use them a little more sparingly (and I include myself in ‘we’!) and focus instead on packing in the information-bearing words.

I’m all in favour of warm fuzzy feelings as a marketing technique, but let’s not forget that in the highly competitive, fast-paced world we live in, consumers and customers are looking for the FACTS, presented in a digestible, appealing way. My personal view is that as a wordsmith (whether you’re translator, copywriter or writer), your mission if you choose to accept it is to use words to craft something that is a pleasure to read while conveying information in an unambiguous way.

Playing with words in this way is an art, and it takes time to perfect it. For help with copywriting, and writing in general, I highly recommend ‘Write to Sell: The Ultimate Guide To Great Copywriting’ by Andy Maslen.

So which foreign language marketing buzzwords irk you the most? For me, it has to be synergie. Bleurgh!

Inverness castle. Image courtesy of http://www.sys-tec.ch/

Last Friday I set off for weekend far, far away from home up in Inverness with other foodie translators. This was my first event since becoming Food & Drink Network Coordinator, and I was really looking forward to meeting other members of the network, and to catching up with Scotnet members, who never fail to put on a good bash.

The event certainly lived up to expectations. On the programme were Karen Stokes (founder and first ever coordinator of the ITI Food & Drink Network), Lulu Norman and Norma Tait, all true experts in this field and each with fascinating real-life examples. Karen ran a practical session addressing and finding solutions to the challenges of working with menus and culture-specific dishes (‘Cullen Skink’, anyone?), while Lulu gave a fascinating insight into her co-translation of a Lebanese cookery book from French into English, and Norma, an expert in the field of whisky, rounded off the day with the brilliantly-named talk ‘My experience – distilled’.

Here are my main takeaways from the day:

• Remember you are selling a product, and think about who you are selling it to – is it the chef or the diner? How tasty a dish sounds is very important, and advanced creative skills are often called for. Take ‘gizzards’, for example. Yum, huh? There is a constant balance to be found between the ‘acceptability’ factor and losing the poetry of the original writing.
• Consumers, particularly higher-end consumers, are usually pretty attuned to foreign words, which can be kept in the translation. Think ‘coulis’ and ‘béarnaise’. Karen’s advice was that if they sell it in Sainsbury’s under a foreign name, that’s a good yardstick. Indeed, sometimes using another European language, particularly French, can act as a ‘bridge’.
• The words we use to describe food can changes between generations. Take ‘muffins’ for example, which I would now tend to use to describe a small, cupcake-like cake rather than a breakfast muffin or ‘English muffin‘ (which I would probably call a ‘breakfast muffin’). Think about who the end user of the document will be and be guided by that.
• Remember that in recipe measurements you may be catering for two ‘Englishes’. Always check with the customer if they’d like conversions, and whether any measurements might even need to be adjusted to suit the type of products available in different countries. Lebanese flour is not necessarily the same as the flour we get in the UK, and other countries may have different techniques for ingredients as common place as garlic, for example. Did you know that in France they tend to remove the green core of a garlic clove before using it?
• Recipe styles can differ between countries. Recipes in the UK have a very discursive and descriptive style, preferring adjectives such as ‘chopped’ or ‘diced’, while many French recipes adopt a fairly technical style.Go for an hourly, rather than a per-word rate, if you can: food being such a clear indicator of cultural difference, translating in this field can be a real labour of love. But don’t let that mean you are short changing yourself!
• As always, some terms just cannot be translated into one word in another culture and the simplest approach is to explain the concept, particularly in an interpreting situation. Norma gave the excellent example of ‘mash tun’. The Portuguese term she once heard used to describe the ‘mash’ (mistura) doesn’t quite capture it, does it?

It is debatable whether ‘Sarko’ had really intended the focus of his visit to be his new wife, Carla Bruni, but as far as our papers, particularly the tabloids, were concerned she was the main attraction. ‘Part Grace Kelly, part Jackie Kennedy, part Princess Diana’, the charmante Carla Bruni gracefully stepped into our green and pleasant land in her little black pumps and we found ourselves collectively seduced by her, rather than by the French President himself, as was perhaps intended.

Or was it?

Amanda Platell writing for Daily Mail praised Bruni’s choice of outfit and contrasted it to Camilla’s less than stylish look, which she jokingly referred to as ‘road-kill’. By the way, how many times in her life is that poor woman going to be compared to another, more conventionally beautiful woman? Nobody’d blame her for having a bit of an inferiority complex. But on this occasion the comparison was especially poignant in light of the French President’s apparent wish for his wife to be the ‘new Diana’. And so it was: The International Herald Tribune ran the headline ‘The New Diana? In Britain, Carla steals the show’ on Thursday.

However this bizarre Sarkozy’s aspiration may be, our reaction to this particular attractive woman dressed beautifully in designer clothing was much the same as it was for Diana; we can’t get enough. But how was our reaction seen in France? ‘Londres craque pour Carla’ (roughly translated as: ‘London goes nuts for Carla’) was the headline in Le Monde on Saturday. However, on the whole my brief scan of the French press today found few articles similar to our gushing praise of Mme. Sarkozy. Our excitement was acknowledged, but rather disdainfully, since the couple are not viewed quite so fondly in France; their whirlwind romance is seen by many as a distraction from the proper business of politics. The Nouvel Obs discussed Gordon Brown and Sarkozy’s plans to ‘change the world’ at length, with only a passing reference to Carla, mentioning that ‘the UK won’t be forgetting [the President's] wife Carla in a hurry’, that she was ‘watched constantly’.

Indeed, the French press seem to be concentrating more on the content and implications of Sarkozy’s speech and exchanges with Gordon Brown. I’m guessing that Sarkozy’s recent poor showing in French polls has been focussing French minds a little more, and on substance over style. Having enjoyed the luxuries of the royal palace, far from the scrutinies of his own press, I imagine it may be a rather bumpy return to earth on his return to France.