“la parole exportée”

My attention is attracted to e-mails that have started coming from YouTube, about what must be ‘Subscription Updates’ in English. But the translated heading is: ‘Mise à jour de l’abonnement’, which has a totally different meaning in French.

So when the first e-mail from YouTube arrived, I opened it with this kind of feeling: ‘What’s going on NOW…’

The people at YouTube (or rather some machine) just wanted to let me know about recent changes in the channels I’ve subscribed to. (Notice that my multiple subscriptions are not reflected in the so-called translation, reinforcing the misunderstanding.) When you subscribe to something, you have to accept terms and conditions, and when your subscription is updated (in the French meaning), it usually means that these terms and conditions have changed (not to your advantage, most of the time…).

It’s not just me. The word UPDATE in this specific sense does not translate easily in French. A client of mine has decided against translating it at all for a particular program they have. Maybe YouTube should follow them.

But of course, given enough doses of it, I’ll get used to this strange use of my native language and won’t notice anymore. Maybe.

How important is translation for your marketing?

I had previously missed this e-mail because it was caught by my e-mail account’s spam filter, and I noticed the heading just as I was deleting the whole lot in one go.

But thanks to spamming stupidity, it was here today again and I opened it.

Yes I know this was risky, considering some recent experience, but I am of a curious disposition and willing to take risks, and how could I resist the lure of this heading?

Nous avons beaucoup de programme de la lange FRANCAISES!

Because most of my readers are anglophones, let me try to be creative -I just love allowing myself to make mistakes!- and craft a fairly reasonable equivalent:

We have many program of the ENGLISHES langage!

In other words: three linguistic errors, and one formatting error in a 9-word heading.

Interestingly, the organization that blasts these e-mails out has a website, and I checked it. They use the same marketing hype there, but it has been edited and looks slightly better. Pity they haven’t thought of updating their marketing e-mails.

Now I have two unrelated questions, and your answers will be greatly appreciated:

1. Would you feel confident to buy some expensive software products in your language version, from a provider that crammed 4 errors in a 9-word heading?

2. And incidentally, would you feel confident to buy some expensive software from a provider that offered (for some) up to 95% discounts on the *standart* (their mistake, not mine) price?

If you value your foreign customers, how do you show it to them?