“Make the slogan easy to translate!” is a massive stop-sign to marketing success.
Sacrificing efficacy for a false-sense of efficiency is stabbing yourself in the hand.
Imagine asking a fashion designer to make you a really beautiful outfit — memorable, unique, bold, red-carpet worthy — then asking “but I also want to be able to blend-in everywhere I go… on the planet.”
You can have a fancy outfit that dazzles and awes only where you wear it most, or you can have a forgettable and generic plain-black suit that will likely work at least 95% of wherever you go. There’s no real such thing as both.
The whole point of copywriting is to play with words, language, meanings, double-meanings, and rhetorical devices until you find something that sticks in someone’s head. There’s a reason one brand line of three words can take hundreds of attempts, and dozens of people to sign-off on. Needless to say, with copywriting, language, and linguistic theory as a whole comes the rule that:
No two languages are alike.
Here’s some great examples, of the best and most successful slogans and brand platforms of all time, and how they don’t translate at all:
- Adidas “Impossible is nothing” from 2004 is translated in French to “Rien n’est impossible” (nothing is impossible) or sometimes “Rien ne m’est impossible” (nothing is impossible for me).
- Both McDonald’s “i’m lovin’ it” and Nike’s “Just do it” are not translated at all — they remain written in English across the world.
- Got Milk was never translated to Spanish for the US-Hispanic market, because the enallage use of “got” does not exist in Spanish.
There’s a difference between translating a word and translating a meaning.
And when you’re copywriting, that’s a massive problem.
Let’s make a hypothetical scenario to ruin one of the greatest ads of all time: in a realm where Volkswagen would have wanted to translate their historic “lemon” ad, they couldn’t — the use of the word “lemon” to describe any object as something defective is only exists in English. After consulting with native speakers of French, Spanish, Dutch, and German, here’s the results.
- Literal translations: Limón, citron, citroen, and zitrone, respectively — none of which make any sense; they’re not cultural metaphors, they’re just fruits.
- Figurative translations: Defectuoso, défectueux, defect, and defekt, respectively — none of which hit the same or really even draw the same creative parallel as the English metaphor. It just says the car is purely garbage.
So had Volkswagen asked for something translatable, the ironically German carmaker wouldn't have even been able to run one of the most iconic pieces of advertising in history in its own market.
Smart marketers know “universality” is a lie
For folks who want to argue that marketing has changed and those slogans are ancient, my rebuttal is that if they’re still around, they’re timeless for a reason. But to your point, a few quick examples: Oatly, the brand that pretty much annihilated soy milk and replaced it with oat milk over the past few years, runs its entire campaign across Europe in English. Many carmakers, such as Fiat and Škoda, use different slogans for different languages, as do shipping companies — for example FedEx. In English, they run by “Where now meets next,” while in France, it’s Nous allons vite. Vous irez loin, roughly meaning “We go fast. You’ll go far.” Notice how it doesn’t even quite hit the same way translated back to English?
A personal example; I once worked on Wendy’s for Central and South America. They asked our Spanish-native writers to find a slogan for the Spanish-speaking countries. When I asked why they couldn’t use the current “We got you,” the response was “It doesn’t punch the same way in Spanish. It wouldn’t really even mean the same thing anyway.”
The client knew the power of copywriting, and the limits it has. They knew asking for something translatable would be a stupid request. They knew it wouldn’t be great, it wouldn’t be universal, and it wouldn’t be as impactful. They knew they’d have to either find a different line in the same spirit, or find something completely different altogether, and they were open to both.
You’ll find in almost every example you try that the truth is, the idea that universality is efficient is totally false. It’s so often ineffective, it’s totally inefficient.
There is nothing wrong with focusing on one language only.
Most markets will understand a line in English — copywriting is also meant to simplify. Again, Oatly conquered the West’s non-dairy milk market entirely in English. You can have other taglines in a similar spirit tailored for other markets, such as other examples above. You can have completely different platforms, or you can simply aim for English, and translate anyway understanding that the line, as best as you try to translate it, will likely not be as impactful in some markets over others — this is what Adidas does. That’s completely okay, because there is no other option. Every brand deals with this. Accept it. The most impactful lines have zero thought of translation in mind when they’re written.
While it’s true that it can happen, there’s no guarantee. You might find something that works great in English and Spanish, or maybe in all the romance languages at once — but you should never expect that.
You can make it bold, powerful, catchy, or unique, or you can make it easy to translate — but you should never guarantee both. I’ll repeat myself once more, sacrificing efficacy for a false-sense of efficiency is really bad marketing.
