21 Countries - Translation Design

Why Hispanics do not automatically mean Spanish

Stereotypes. Stereotypes are often oversimplified assumptions that one particular individual possesses the characteristics associated with the class due to his or her membership in it.

We’ve seen stereotypes being applied to races, genders, religious groups, etc. and unfortunately Hispanics are no exception. One of those characteristics often oversimplified is the assumption that just because someone is Hispanic, looks Hispanic or has a Hispanic name, it automatically means that particular individual automatically speaks Spanish or thinks like any other Spanish-speaking Hispanic.

With that in mind, some of the questions your business should be asking at this point include: What language does my target population speak? How much of an impact does Cultural Heritage play in their decision process? Am I relying on stereotypes to deliver my branding message?

Therefore, as a starting point to answer these important questions, we would like to share the descriptions used by Geoscape that provide a fantastic view into the differences that exist amongst Hispanics due to many factors such as the number of generations, length of time living in the US, etc. often referred to as “Hispanicity” which is understood as a very particular type of acculturation.

1. Americanizado (Americanized) – About 15% of the total Hispanic population. This category describes those individuals that were born in the US, whose families have been living here for at least three generations and that still preserve a few Hispanic cultural practices. Nevertheless, as expected, Americanized Hispanics first language is English and speak almost no Spanish whatsoever.
2. Nueva Latina (New Latina) – About 26.5% of the total Hispanic population. This category describes those individuals that were born in the US, but whose families have only been living here for a couple of generations. For that reason, they still preserve some Hispanic cultural practices yet their exposure to the English language through most of their life means they prefer to interact with others in English, even though some still speak Spanish.
3. Bi-Cultural – About 27.5% of the total Hispanic population. This category describes individuals that immigrated to the US when they were very kids or young adults. Therefore, they bring with them most of their Hispanic cultural practices and quickly learn to interact in English, so that they can be considered Bi-lingual in the sense that they can speak both English and Spanish almost at the same level.
4. Hispano (Hispanic) – About 17% of the total Hispanic population. This category describes individuals that immigrated to the US when they were already adults and have been living here for at least a decade. For that reason, they bring and preserve most of their Hispanic cultural practices and prefer to interact with others in their native language – Spanish – even though most of them speak some English.
5. Latinoamericana (Latin American) – About 14% of the total Hispanic population. This category describes individuals that immigrated to the US very recently – within the last 10 years – so they basically preserve all their Hispanic cultural practices and still identify themselves much more with their home country than with the US. As expected, this particular group tends to always interact in Spanish, and in many cases speaks no English whatsoever.

These guidelines can help businesses understand what type of Hispanic they should be “speaking” to based on their target population, and explains why the use of Spanish on certain contexts – such as mobile phones and video games – has a bigger impact and faster ROI than in others – such as services for retirees. But yet again, attempting to group over 15% of the population in the United States in only 5 categories probably still qualifies as stereotyping and should serve as a reminder that more research is needed, and that there’s no real substitute for talking to your customers, knowing who they are, what they need, and how they like to communicate with you.

Hispanic Buying Power

Businesses often search for the next best investment opportunity.  Unfortunately the lack of information, fear of the unknown or lack of resources limits their field of vision, hindering businesses from seeing what’s right in front of them.

Hispanic or Latino consumers are no longer under debate on whether it makes sense to target them or not.  The question “is it worth it?” has suddenly morphed into “how much is it worth it?” and “how can I get in?”.

Poder magazine recently reported new marketing initiatives expanding to target households with annual income of over $150,000, whose number are expected to double in the next  4 years.  This new generation of “global” consumers is characterized by tech savy individuals, highly mobile and educated, with median incomes on the $51,000 annual range.

Even though once dominated by familiar regions such as L.A., New York, or Miami, Hispanic presence is now a national phenomenon.  The Datos 2008 report indicates that the Latino population grows at a rythm of 1 Million more individuals per year, with births, not immigration, accounting for most of that growth.

Anyone looking for a sound recession proof plan?

Do not translate, communicate

Very interesting new piece by NPR on how to market to Hispanics. More and more sources of information, including the Census point to the clear trend of the Hispanic population and the Latino Buying Power. Of course the question for businesses and companies is how to become part of that community, how to identify their brands, products and services with that community, and how to appeal to that buying power in a win-win relationship.

Both the research mentioned in the article as well as the experiences by many companies that are starting to concentrate on reaching Hispanics, make it clear that if companies focus enough marketing on this particular segment, they’ll have “a group of loyal consumers ready to buy their product”.  On top of that, add the fact that their average population is at least ten years younger than the one of the general public, and you have a customer that will stay with you for the long run.

The challenge in our opinion is that most companies stay just there, at the marketing level.  They invest millions of dollars in flashy campaigns and collaterals to deliver their “Brand Promise”, yet they forget that reaching Hispanics also means understand their CULTURE.

And by Culture we mean all the aspects that make Hispanics what they are – their costumes, their way of thinking, value what they deem important, speak their language (in all methods of communication), appeal to their interests, understand their needs, contribute to their community, etc. (No stereotypes please!)

For example, amongst Latinos it is a well known fact that at home, Latinas are the decision makers when it comes to deciding what gets bought in the home.  Therefore, companies such as IKEA have specific processes in place to understand Latinas, such as having “Hispanic advocates” in most of the stores.  It is just a shame that such hard work gets somewhat lost when you follow up on their brand promise, stop at a store, and realize that in those “moments of truth” the stores were not as careful and did not place that much attention to details on Hispanics and their culture.  For example, part of a culture is the written language, yet many places throughout the stores – including restaurant menus, maps, information pamphlets, instructions, even the Company Mission! – have grammar and spelling errors.  It may sound like a trivial thing in the overall context, but that’s why most Hispanics tend to revert to information in English when they realize the Spanish information is many times useless.

So now you know why you need to care about this market, but most importantly, how to target them the right way. Three words of advice: “Don’t translate, communicate.”

The difference between Translation and Localization

We are often asked the question about the difference between what we do and what regular translation companies do.  Hence I think it’s worth digging a little deeper into the difference between the terms “Translation” and “Localization”.

Translation is the “act of rendering words from one language into another”.  Unfortunately, most of the time this process is implemented as a straightforward and mechanical conversion of words from one language into another.  For example, the word “tree” in English can be translated as “árbol” in Spanish.  This makes sense at a certain level since that’s how people tend to learn a foreign language and is why dictionaries are still needed nowadays.

But if we start to look deeper into this process, we’ll soon realize that there are words that have multiple translations.  Even basic ones such as “boy” can easily offer a myriad of choices such as “niño”, “muchacho”, “chico”, “chaval”, “chacho”, “pibe”, etc.  On top of that, it also starts to become apparent that communication and the exchange of information require a lot more than the use of individual words.  Concepts such as context, grammar, spelling, cultural sensitivity, gender, number, levels of formality, country of origin, dialect, demographics, data formats, etc. start then to appear and shed some light into what Localization really means.

Localization is the “process of adapting the original contents to the linguistic and cultural systems for use in a different language or in a different country”.  This process requires a deep understanding of the original meaning of the source information and/or ideas so as to ‘render’ it appropriately in the target language.  Furthermore, the final version of those contents should not only follow the rules of the target language but should also match the target audience with regards to their needs, goals, expectations, culture and state of mind.

In other words:       Localization = Language + Culture + Branding

Most companies miss this last critical element and just concentrate on making sure their information is properly translated without realizing that, even before a customer attempts to interact with them, they already bring to the table a set of expectations based both on their experience with similar companies as well as with the brand promise delivered by marketing and advertising.

This Localization process applies to all modes of communication – written and spoken, visual and non-visual, digital and in-print – hence should be planned in advance so as to avoid wasting resources that can sometimes even deliver experiences that are so poor or badly planned for that will make it almost impossible to get a “second chance” in the eyes of that customer.

Here’s an example of what a Translated website looks like:

Some of the things you’ll notice include:

• Top link choices offer the same list, even in the same order
• Main navigation menu again offers the same options, in the same order
• Reuse of images, where again the text has been simply translated
• Pages are basically a mirror image of each other
• Some Spanish options were simply translated without concern for where they take you or what their content is. For example, the English option “Open Development” refers to a Branded program which was simply translated as “Desarrollo expansivo” (not branded) and which takes you to an English version of the site (no Spanish version)

Here’s an example of what a Localized website looks like:

Some of the things you’ll notice include:

• Similar page structure and framework, yet…
• Different color palettes and imagery
• Main and secondary navigation menus are different, with choices in a more relevant order
• Personalized shortcuts based on both profile and locale (e.g. offers “Futbol”)
• Advertisements are different and relevant for each audience

As you can imagine, this same process should be followed on all other customer interaction points such as the telephone, forms, brochures and catalogs, marketing materials, paper communications, branches, etc.

Spanish Website localization done right

With so many examples of translations done wrong or localizations that went bad, finding instances of ones done right is very hard to do.

Therefore I was really excited of finding out about Humana and their new Spanish initiative: “Nuestra Salud” (“Our Health”).

We often get asked what the right steps should be when having an English-only website and wanting to expand the information and services into other languages, particularly Spanish.  So here’s great list of things Humana did right that others should follow to not lag behind:

1. Website address (also know as URL): Humana has a default site in English – humana.com. Following industry standards, they opted for espanol.humana.com as the root for their Spanish initiative.  But they did not stop at that.  They realized that spelling it out tends to cause issues in the sense that “espanol” (with an n) is not a real word, yet saying “español” (with a tilde) is hard to type into a web address. Hence they created an “alias” for their Spanish website in the form of “humana.com/nuestra_salud” (/our_health) which makes for an easy-to-remember site that removes the complexity of having to spell out the actual address.
2. Human-friendly URLs have the added advantage that aside from making them easy to remember, it’s easy to understand in all mediums – magazines, ads, and even over the telephone.  There’s no confusion about how it should be typed or how certain words should be spelled.
3. Consistency – From browsing their site you can tell a lot of thought and effort went into doing it.  Terminology is used in a consistent fashion throughout the website.
4. Proper translations – It’s obvious that a great deal of effort was spent in identifying not only the context-appropriate terminology for the English terms of their industry, but also in identifying which branded terms that needed to remain in English (e.g. MyHumana, Humana One, etc.) and which ones needed to be translated (e.g. Personal Care Account as Cuenta médica personal).
5. Information clarity – Overall, the information provided is clear no matter how wide or deep you navigate.  I’m glad to see they did not opted for straight translations from English words into Spanish but expanded the words into phrases that are clear in each language.  For example, the English term “Life” is pretty obvious in the context of who Humana is, yet if you were to perform a straight translation, the term “Vida” would you not tell you much about what it really means and is in fact confusing. In this case they went for “seguro de vida” (life insurance) which avoids all ambiguity and makes it clear right from the start.
6. Concept localization – You can tell that in some cases they also identified the overarching concept so as to translate it in a way that was clear. For example, the slogan “Guidance when you need it most” was not translated in a literal way, but was rather converted to “Su consejero cuando más lo necesita“(“Your advisor when you need it the most”) which conveys the same meaning, yet it’s more relevant for the target audience.
7. “Zpeling” – Finally, it was very refreshing to see a company not afraid of using accents, tildes, open question marks and other grammatical elements that are part of the core of a language yet tend to be omitted often because “they don’t appear in a keyboard” (Would you hire someone with spelling error on their resume?)

Here are a couple of images that show some of these concepts in practice:

Nevertheless, there are still some areas of improvement to take sites like this to the next level and show your customers that you really care and that you can talk to them in their language:

• In general, the Spanish version is a mirror image of the English site. Even though as we pointed out the information is clearly present in both languages, it is obvious that the target user population of the site cannot be the same for both languages: different realities, different needs, different goals, different expectations, etc. Normally those are sometimes met by a simple reorganization of the site (e.g. same collection of links yet sorted in a way that’s more relevant) all the way up to complicated reorganizations that match user’s expectations (e.g. one target population may relate a Healthcare Spending question with “Plans & Products” yet another might think of it in terms of “Health and Wellness”). In other words, each target user population deserves its own Information Architecture
  
• With such an ambitious effort to translate the entire site, owners need to be careful to map out all the interrelations with other sites/services. For example, when looking at individual plans, it offers information about “Humana One” and “CompBenefits” yet the link takes you to an English-only version of the site. Even though the ideal would be to have Spanish versions of every service you offer, we know that’s not financially feasible in all instances, yet in a situation like this one you should at least warn users that they will be taken to an English-only site, or upon arrival you should offer some very basic information in Spanish informing them that the rest of the content in provided only in English

21 Countries Introduces New Translation Design Service to Help Communication between Hispanics and Businesses

Phoenix, AZ – November 19, 2008 - 21 Countries introduced a specialized Spanish Localization service to help area small businesses reach Hispanic markets by offering services and information in their own language.

Whether it is visual information, non-visual messages, digital content or in-print materials, using plain translation services can mean wasted resources and potentially irreversible (and embarrassing) brand image damage.  By correctly designing a translation and localization strategy that takes into account cultural differences and language nuances, 21 Countries can help persuade, explain and convey the interpretation of information that businesses intended in the first place in a controlled and directed manner. The result is a simple and clear message that resonates with the target audience.

21 Countries specializes in Spanish Localization services for businesses. For more information, contact Eduardo Olvera at (623) 229-4738.

Powered by Wordpress
Copyright 2008. 21 Countries. All rights reserved