Avoid the Colloquialisms

Home > Build > Design > Articles > Content

by Peter Cooper

All right mukkas, can you get the jist of what I'm saying, huh? Excuse the informality for a second but did you really 'get the jist'? While some people may be nodding at this point others may not understand a word. I'm being confusing, aren't I? Every day, many Web sites present their visitors with colloquialisms and other dialectal mannerisms which many visitors really can't be expected to understand.

Saying 'fanny' in the United States might be OK, but in the UK the word may be censored out due to its definition of female what-nots. Now imagine advertising a "swimsuit with a picture of an octopus on the fanny" to a British audience! Even better, 'sale' might sound great in the English speaking world, but don't use it with a French speaker, it means 'dirty'! Obviously, this probably doesn't apply if your site is an English site, French readers shouldn't misread the English.. but if you have a French section for your Web site and you continue to use the same large 'SALE' graphic, it's not so good. Thankfully, with the French being so educated, they're unlikely to take too much offense, but there's still room for mistakes.

Just these two points can open up a whole 'can of worms' (set of problems) for you to deal with. It's well documented that several new types of car ('car' means 'coach' in French) meant for the international market were given names that were highly offensive in other tongues, all without the companies realizing. Even if you write 'color' or 'realize' you might annoy someone, it all sounds rather complicated, doesn't it?

If you're thinking of launching your glorious new e-commerce site to an international audience, you may think you're rather clever by developing three templates (for, say, English, French and Spanish) and then slotting your database of products into it. Wrong! You need to have the descriptions of your products in all three languages too. It's not much use letting your customers navigate the site in French without converting product descriptions and explanations to French too, after all, if they wanted to read English they would've picked 'English' in the first place, right?

Then again, as we've demonstrated it's not merely other languages which cause problems. Even differences between British English, American English, Canadian English and Australian English can be troublesome from time to time. Ask a Briton what a 'faucet' is, and they'll usually shrug with ignorance. If you're in the business of selling faucets online and want to cover a British market, you won't get very far by using that name alone.

Focus!

The key point is to focus on your target markets. Don't attempt to cover every language ever devised in an attempt to gain customers. You'll lose custom with the effort of trying. Focus clearly on the markets you want to sell to or benefit from. Pick say, English and French. Be as objective as you can with definitions in both of these languages. Don't pick definitions that won't be understood by large groups of Anglophones or Francophones. Remember the faucet? Show a picture of it, that'll help matters, and while you're at it call it by its other standard name too. Perhaps you could list it as a 'mixer faucet/tap' as opposed to merely 'faucet'.

If maintaining a site dealing with universities or colleges, instead of flinging about words such as "fraternity" and "varsity", how about "university" and "students groups/clubs"? You're then somewhat sure to be understood collectively by people in the US, Canada, Australia and the UK.

Hey, it's the accent too!

With developments in streaming media, many people have speculated that the e-commerce sites of the future will use both movie and audio streams heavily to help advertise their product range. Leaving my personal opinion on such developments out of the picture, we're bound to hit some problems in this area too. The only similar market at the moment is television, and it's rare that you'll get many stations with international coverage. Perhaps MTV or CNN, but even the international and regional versions of these stations are refined for other audiences. The Internet allows us to refine content in a similar fashion , but companies don't seem to be doing it in a big way yet. With streaming media, this is going to be even more important.

Do you really want your potential customers not being able to understand your streaming audio or video? From personal experience I know that a vast percentage of Americans would be unable to understand my accent or cope with the speed of my conversational speech. This scenario, and I live in London, the capital of the country whom our language is named after! Worse is the fact that people merely 400 miles away from me (Northeastern England), within the same country, sound nearly alien and can also be hard to understand. Luckily, we're not at this stage of mass streaming media advertisement yet, but it's not far away. Be ready.

Some of the most understandable English language accents are currently used by organizations such as CNN and the BBC to ensure successful communication with a variety of English speakers. The BBC World Service is a widely popular international radio station for expatriates and English speakers alike. The general accent is a rather generic, some may say 'posh', English accent, which interestingly is rather uncommon in England. Nonetheless, it's highly understandable, even if people make fun of it. Also understandable is the 'generic' American accent of the north eastern US used mainly on CNN International and other international American stations. Content aside, when was the last time you couldn't understand what a CNN newsreader was saying? What I'm essentially trying to say is that unless you're focused squarely at the Scottish market, say, don't choose someone with a deep Scottish accent to sell your products, it probably won't work.

The Final Thing?

Perhaps my main piece of advice is to just be thoughtful. Don't leap into a strategy without analyzing the possible outcome(s). Take care over your plans and check that colloquialisms won't hurt or offend those of alternate dialect. If you care about your non-home market customers, you'll soon learn from any mistakes.

Perhaps it'd be far easier if we learnt to speak Esperanto, nein?