Global customers on the line: how to master common localization mishaps

To make sure your campaigns don’t get caught in a mistranslation mishap, let’s look at some of the regrettably common mistakes you need to avoid.

One of the most frequent and damaging mistakes brands make is translating content word-for-word without considering cultural nuances. Language is more than just vocabulary – it’s the culmination of a region’s history, society, even its personality.

 

Classic mistranslations offer potent lessons. Consider one international airline that translated its English slogan “Fly in Leather” into Spanish. The result, “Vuela en Cuero,” unfortunately meant “flying naked” in some Spanish-speaking regions. While it might raise a smile, the confusion and lack of international consideration were hardly befitting of a major airline.

 

Poor cultural understanding causes confusion, offence and alienation in your customers. Rather than feeling listened to and understood, they’re left feeling frustrated at your lack of care or competence. Ultimately, this leaves them much less likely to trust your brand.

 

How to avoid it: Work with cultural and language experts who understand idiomatic expressions and cultural context. Free translation tools alone can’t catch these nuances, so human translator oversight is essential to ensure content resonates appropriately with your audiences.

Not all speakers of a language use the same words or expressions. Variations exist, even when the official language is static.

 

In the US, “pants” means trousers, but in the UK it refers to underwear. Similarly, in Canada, “toque” is a warm winter hat, whereas in France, it refers to a chef’s hat. Such distinctions may seem minor, but they can significantly impact how a message is received.

 

Regional language mistakes might not sting customers as strongly as full mother tongue mistranslations, but they still communicate a lack of care and respect. If you overlook them, you’ll look out of touch or invite misunderstandings.

 

They can make your organization appear as if it doesn’t see the worth in properly researching regional variations as a means of connecting with customers. And at the worst end of the spectrum, they can cause offence and lasting damage to trust.

 

How to avoid it: Conduct market research to understand if, where, and how regional dialects and cultural nuances manifest themselves. Our online translation platform, powered by AI and human input, can incorporate market-specific translation memories and help ensure appropriate word choice for each target audience.

If your brand’s voice is unique, strong and consistent, you’ll not only build an identity set apart from the competition, but inspire audience loyalty and ensure the original intent of your message is clearly understood.

 

Fully automated translation tools can fail to maintain tone consistency, leading to situations where formal and informal language are used interchangeably. For instance, in some languages, brands need to decide whether to use a formal or informal pronoun when addressing customers. Failing to do so can make a brand seem either too rigid or overly casual.

 

Tone is critical to building a sense of authenticity amongst your customers, as well as ensuring your brand appears polished and professional. If your tone of voice is inconsistent, it can make your communications appear jarring and poorly crafted, harming trust.

 

How to avoid it: Establish clear tone-of-voice guidelines for different markets and ensure AI tools respect these rules. RWS’s tone-modelling technology helps you maintain a consistent voice across languages, ensuring a seamless experience worldwide.

While free machine translation can be speedy and has advanced significantly, it is still prone to errors, particularly if the content is complex or sensitive.

 

Mistranslated medical content, legal disclaimers, and contracts can contain inaccuracies which put your business at legal risk. It’s not just complex copy that’s affected either – restaurant menus translated solely by AI can also suffer from inaccuracies. In languages like Portuguese, the word for “grenade” and “pomegranate” could be mixed up by an English speaker – a recipe for serious run-ins with police.

 

Relying heavily on unreviewed machine-translated copy can lead to embarrassing or confusing mistakes that erode audience trust. Worse, however, errors can cause dangerous misinterpretations that can put your customers – and by extension, your business’ future success and prosperity – in harm’s way.

 

How to avoid it: Always follow machine-generated translations with human translator post-editing – or find a solution that combines both. Professional linguists can refine AI-generated text to ensure accuracy. And high-risk content, such as legal and healthcare information, should always undergo rigorous checks.

A well-localized site should fit every visitor like a glove. Digital experiences and the expectations customers have of them differ between regions, so a one-size-fits-all approach to UX can lead to issues with navigation, untranslated UI elements, and clunky language selection tools which ignore key customer groups.

 

How it impacts your customers:

If your user experience needs work, customers will struggle to access the information or features they need, or fail to understand them due to mistranslations. Frustrated customers will leave your site and opt for much better optimized competitor experiences and be much less likely to trust your brand in the future – or advocate for it.

 

How to avoid it: Invest in full-site localization, accounting for language and culture through navigation, UX design, and language selection. This means offering region-specific websites with fully localized content, including customer support, pricing, and reviews in the user’s native language.

So what do these localization mistakes look like in the real world? And how did customer reactions impact the brands that made them?

 

When a large Spanish fashion brand chose to release a line of bangles in France that had proved highly popular with their domestic audience, they were stung by a literal translation. In Spanish, bangles are called “pulseras de estilo esclava”. In Spanish, however, “esclava” means both the words bangle and slave. It was unfortunately translated into the latter, causing uproar and a rapid apology.

 

The lesson? Literal translations can fail to account for cultural and linguistic nuance, resulting in the copy appearing offensive, ridiculous, or tone-deaf. A thorough localization, overseen by an expert, could have avoided this.

 

When a major eCommerce platform launched a Diwali campaign in India, the intent was to connect with local audiences during one of the country’s most important festivals. But instead of featuring Indian families, customs, or traditions, the campaign leaned heavily on Western imagery and values. Indian consumers were not impressed, leading to minimal engagement and traction.

 

The lesson? Surface-level localization can appear lazy or even disrespectful. Swapping out language while keeping the same creative isn’t an option, or you risk alienating your global customers.

 

While many brands struggle with localization, others set the standard. Take Airbnb. Prior to 2018, the company translated content into 31 languages but retained the same content, design, and site architecture. 

 

Today, it offers a multilingual digital experience in 62 languages that adapts not only content but also customer support, user-generated content, currency, and legal information based on the user’s region. 

 

By tailoring every aspect of the user journey, Airbnb ensures that users feel welcomed and understood, regardless of location. This meticulous approach to localization contributed significantly to the brand’s global growth and user satisfaction.

To simplify your localization strategy, here are the key problems, impacts, and how AI-human localization can stop issues from occurring.

 

RWS tackles these common localization pitfalls head-on, providing robust solutions designed to simplify the process and ensure your global content connects authentically everywhere. A cornerstone of this approach, particularly for businesses seeking an efficient blend of AI speed with expert human oversight, is our advanced online translation platform. This platform is engineered to greatly simplify the localization process, transforming it from a potential bottleneck into a streamlined pathway to accurate and nuanced translations.

 

Our online solution combines the speed of AI with the precision of human translators. While AI instantly translates, human experts post-edit the output, ensuring that cultural nuances, idiomatic expressions, and brand voice remain intact. This partnership guarantees both accuracy and efficiency, making it ideal if you need high-quality localization at scale.

 

Brand consistency is crucial when expanding internationally. Your brand’s tone, message, and personality should remain recognizable across languages while still feeling natural to each audience.

 

With RWS, our technology ensures consistency, using custom tone-of-voice modelling and terminology glossaries. These tools help you maintain your identity across different markets, preventing misinterpretations and tone inconsistencies that can dilute your brand messaging.

 

A key challenge in localization is maintaining relevance across different regions. Many translation solutions treat languages as monolithic, but in reality, lots of variations can exist even within the same language.

 

The platform’s translation memory technology stores past content by market rather than just language. This means your messaging can be adapted to suit regional differences while maintaining accuracy and coherence. Whether addressing Spanish-speaking customers in Spain or Latin America, RWS ensures your language use is culturally and contextually appropriate.

Poor localization isn’t just an aesthetic misstep – it directly impacts your bottom line, costing sales, eroding trust, and damaging your hard-won reputation. A single error in translation can alienate entire customer bases, while culturally misaligned marketing can ruin brand credibility.

 

RWS empowers you to mitigate these risks. Our approach, exemplified by solutions like our advanced online translation platform, intelligently combines AI efficiency with indispensable human expertise. This ensures you can translate rapidly while maintaining the precision and cultural alignment essential for genuine customer connection.

 

The most successful global brands localize with intelligence, strategically blending technology with deep cultural insight to engage audiences authentically.