What Happens When Retail Packaging Translation is a Bust?
When retail packaging translations go bust, the brand suffers. The missed translations may offend customers, push them to a new brand and eventually force them to leave you all together. Terrible retail packaging translations may also lead to bad press, humiliation and internal job loss (marketers, pay attention!). In this example, phrasing intended to speak…
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When retail packaging translations go bust, the brand suffers. The missed translations may offend customers, push them to a new brand and eventually force them to leave you all together. Terrible retail packaging translations may also lead to bad press, humiliation and internal job loss (marketers, pay attention!).
In this example, phrasing intended to speak to the intensely good flavor of a shrimp flavored goodie borders addiction.
In this example, the terrible translation and lost context would have any family reaching for their kids.
Yet numerous retailers continue to rely on machine translation alone to translate packaging. Only after the angry calls to customer support do they reconsider their decision to fully rely on Google Translate. This doesn’t just happen with packaging, it happens with all online communications.
Take this Swedish query from a customer to a retailer.
Hens animoji är fel och micken mjutar inte. Hur fixar vi det?
Google Translate says this means, Her animoji is wrong and the mic does not mutter. How do we fix it?
Interested in Getting Great Translations for Retail?
Our translations, which can be done with human, machine, or a combo of both through our core tech which really fine tunes the machine translation process is, ”Her/his emoji is wrong and the microphone doesn’t mute. How do we fix it?”
Better, right?
The importance of customer service in retail is supported by hundreds of statistics (check out some of our favs), but translation for retail rarely makes these stats.
- 64% of customers consider customer service more important than price when making a buying decision
- 52% of consumers will make additional purchases from a brand after following a positive customer service experience
Since 79 percent of customers say they’re going to continue shopping online post-pandemic, the world truly is your oyster. If you’re communicating with your customers through packaging or other means of communication—email, FAQs, chat—don’t ruin your opportunities to connect with and win global, non-English speaking customers by giving them more than crack shrimp or stir fried children.
No matter how obscure the language, our translations for retail are the best. Interested in getting things right? Sign up for meeting with our sales team or check out our commitment to security and technology.