Communicating to be understood

Willy Brandt said, If I’m selling to you, I speak your language. If I’m buying, dann müssen Sie Deutsch sprechen!

Machine translation tools are excellent. When we need to understand a text written in a language that we do not understand, it is effortless to comprehend its content when using them. Its existence has made ours much more manageable.

When talking about institutional communication, where a company intends to sell in a foreign country, resorting to this type of translation is a bad idea. The texts resulting from these translations have errors and syntactics that are not natural in the target language. The situation is even worse when the source texts have errors and incorrect syntax. The result is disastrous.

I had the opportunity to read many embarrassing things, such as a Portuguese speaker saying goodbye in an email with a hug. The automatic translator translated into French as étreinte, a form that a francophone would never use. Presenting yourself in a market with a language that sounds strange to your speakers is halfway to giving an unreliable image.

Some companies believe that translating their website into English is sufficient to address all international markets. That is not true. We cannot assume that everyone speaks our language or believe everyone speaks English. If we want to sell, we have to address customers to recognize and build trust and credibility through the correct language.