Last week the US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton paid a visit to her Russian counterpart, Sergei Lavrov.  In an effort to inject a bit of humor and improve relations between the US and Russia, somebody came up with a great idea to present a symbolic button – signifying the new era in US / Russian relations that Clinton’s team hope to embark on.

Unfortunately, not even the experts at the State Department got this right.  The Russian “peregruzka” (перегрузка in Cyrillic letters) doesn’t mean “reset.”  It means “overloaded” or “overcharged.”  The word they really wanted to aim for was “perezagruzka” – a difference of just a few letters.  The likliehood is that whoever printed up the button wasn’t the person who did the translation – and that the final product wasn’t double checked one more time before it got to Russia.

Although this may be a bit of a lighthearted moment for international politics, if this were to happen on your website, well, the potential for embarrassment could be high, especially if you’re a business looking to create customers abroad.  There are often many people and steps involved in creating a website.  Putting translated content (perhaps content that’s written in a different alphabet or characters) adds an extra layer of attention to detail that is needed.  Have your translator check the final product before it goes live to make sure that all the content made it correctly onto the website.  You’ll save yourself the hassle of needing a reset button in the future.

Check out the Guide to Good Translation for tips on avoiding common pitfalls of content translation.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 9th, 2009 at 3:42 pm and is filed under social media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.