affordablelanguageservices.com

Last Thursday, Lynn Elfers was honored at Women Excel (WE) awards at the Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber of Commerce’s annual WE Celebrate Breakfast as a finalist in the category of Community Impact. Being chosen as a finalist recognizes the contribution that Lynn and our company Affordable Language Services has made to the-well being of the Cincinnati region in general and specifically how the business has helped the immigrant and foreign visitor community.

Last Friday, October 9th, we attended the World Trade Day Kentucky 2015 at the Kentucky International Convention Center in Louisville Kentucky to a sold out crowd of 400 trade practicioners, international dignitaries, leaders of industry and government officials.   The exhibits hall hosted display 50 booths ranging from Trade Service Providers, multinational companies and international dignitaries.  There were 16 representatives from over 14 nations were present at World Trade Day Kentucky 2015 to facilitate global trade and commerce.

We’ve all heard the horror stories about poorly researched business translation. Exxon, for instance, was appalled to learn that its brand in Japan, Esso, literally means “stalled car” when spoken aloud in Japanese. Even Coca-Cola has fallen prey to poor translation; after installing thousands of billboards across Taiwan, Coca-Cola executives learned that the characters used to convey the brand name phonetically could mean either “A Female Horse Stuffed with Wax” or “Bite the Wax Tadpole.” Despite these cautionary tales of business translation service gone dreadfully wrong, there are still areas of gross oversight when it comes to translation. Today, we’re focusing on an especially underappreciated recipe for foreign marketing disaster: failing to carefully translate acronyms.