Editor’s note: Daniel Stächelin is editor and writer, client insights at translation firm Language Intelligence, Rochester, N.Y.
Understanding complex global markets is challenging, especially when you’re unfamiliar with a culture or language. By familiarizing yourself with your respondents’ cultures before designing your surveys, and following steps to ensure quality translation, you’ll be more likely to gather reliable data.
As a translator, I know this firsthand. Translation can be an expensive, rigorous process. There isn’t always a direct equivalent across languages for certain words, and when I translate I often have to adapt text so that it is appropriate for my target audience.
Let’s look at an example: German uses the passive voice much more frequently than English. Although I often adapt sentences to use the active voice in English, I have to be judicious in how much license I give myself in making such adaptations. That’s because, as Steven Pinker points out in his book The Sense of Style:
“The reader’s attention usually starts out on the entity named by the subject of the sentence. Actives and passives differ in which character gets to be the subject, and hence which starts out in the reader’s mental spotlight. An active construction trains the reader’s gaze on someone who is doing something . . . The passive trains the reader’s gaze on someone who’s having something done to him.”
If translators are not careful, they may unwittingly shift the focus of a sentence, skewing the data.
To provide tips for marketing researchers conducting international research projects, I’ve pulled together examples that focus on three important variables of translation – context, social situation and privacy – in the setting of translating surveys in three different languages.
Context is key – China
As a marketing researcher, you put a lot of time and effort into crafting your questions so that they capture certain nuances and elicit certain responses. What happens when you have your well-thought-out survey questions translated into a language like Chinese? You run the risk of receiving skewed data.
Chinese is a complex language with more than 50,000 characters. In ancient Chinese, words and phrases were usually represented by single characters. But gradually, as new concepts were introduced into society, single-character words were combined to create two-character words with more subtle and specific meanings.
To illustrate this, I spoke to Ting Chi, localization engineer at Language Intelligence and a native of Beijing. Chi recalled an instance where a translator had translated the word “audit” in a way that she didn’t think was appropriate for the context, although the word was technically correct.
“He used the word 审计, but for me, that Chinese word is most commonly used for auditing financial documents. Maybe because 审 means ‘examine’ and 计 means ‘calculate.’”
If the content being translated isn’t about financial documents, there are a couple of different options that can be used, each with a subtly different emphasis:
审核 – examine and verify
审查 – examine and inspect
核查 – check
核计 – assess/calculate
This quality of the Chinese language, where two concepts are combined to produce a more nuanced concept, makes the Chinese translation process very rigorous. Be sure to include enough time to complete this process. If you are outsourcing translation services, focus on hiring translators that are linguistically skilled enough to understand the nuances of words such as these so that your questions come across the way they were originally intended to.
Sensitive social situations – Brazil
Brazilians are very friendly and have a natural willingness to be helpful, according to Juliana Mendonça, a Language Intelligence translator. Such helpfulness may lead you to acquire a lot of interesting and reliable data, but there are a few things you’ll want to keep in mind before going into interviews or designing your surveys.
“Due to the fear of being cheated or ripped off, and due to the great volume of all types of crimes, respondents might be very suspicious of someone’s intentions,” says Mendonça. “It is important to establish a rapport either in person or through a person or institution they trust in order to proceed with a survey. This attitude might also lead to bogus answers on surveys. So, people might think they’re answering or willing to answer, but the answers might not represent reality depending on the circumstances.”
There are many sensitive issues you may want to be careful in addressing when conducting international research. The people of Brazil are currently divided due to many years of political corruption, so any references to political parties or political preferences could be damaging to your company or study. It is also a country with many social problems, such as crime, violence and poverty, as well as poor access to education and health services. Understanding factors like these can help you craft questions that are appropriate for your respondents, resulting in better and more reliable data.
Value of privacy – Germany
One of the biggest concerns in Germany surrounding marketing research is privacy. While the Bundesdatenschutzgesetz (Federal Data Protection Act) has been in effect for decades, Germans are generally private.
Nazi and East-German communist pasts, for example (during which the Gestapo and Stasi spied on its citizens and encouraged people to inform on their neighbors), helped shape this general attitude toward privacy. But that’s only one piece of the puzzle. A more recent revelation that the NSA was spying on Chancellor Angela Merkel’s telephone conversations sparked huge controversy throughout Germany, and has led many Germans to become even more leery of sharing information than they were before.
Another area where Germans are private is money. According to an article explaining why roughly 80 percent of all transactions in Germany are done in cash, “Germans like the anonymity of cash, in keeping with their general enthusiasm for tightly protecting privacy.”
Friederike Mast, a translator and linguist at Language Intelligence, Frankfurt, says that people in Germany generally dislike discussing money: “The higher the amount, the less likely someone will be willing to talk about it. It is, for example, quite rare that people openly share how much they make or how much they paid for a house or a car.”
That doesn’t mean you can’t ask questions about money or household income in your surveys. But the key is reassuring your respondents that their privacy won’t be breached and that the information they provide you and your team remains anonymous. That way, German respondents will be more likely to open up, leading to quality insights.
Quality
Every country has customs and norms that can affect how people respond to your survey. Questions that seem innocuous may address culturally sensitive topics that your respondents don’t feel comfortable answering. Education levels, marital status, ethnicity, religion, politics and privacy are all topics that could skew your data, depending on how you frame your questions and depending on the cultures in which you field your survey.
I’ve only touched on some of the considerations that go into international survey design and translation. Understanding some of the predominant attitudes in the countries where you’re conducting your study is key when conducting international marketing research. As with any project your work on, the more preparation you put into it, the greater the level of quality you’ll achieve.