Thursday 9 September 2010

Nokia. Connecting People... in different ways

Taking my new mobile handset out of its box, I glanced at the text printed on the box and noticed the different translations; first the English version, followed by the German version, the Spanish, the French, the Italian, the Swedish and so forth. Just comparing the tagline "Designed the way we work" with the various equivalent translations demonstrates the challenges a translator faces every day. Do we translated word-for-word; completely re-write and risk loosing the original meaning; find the equivalent in our language or, simply, leave the English version? "Designed the way we work" is apparently "Professionell. Elegant. Effektiv" in German. In French it's "Adapté à notre façon de travailler" and in Swedish? Well, the translator decided to leave it in English! And the Italian translator decided the same. The one language which was missing, and quite surprisingly so, was the Finnish version - for some reason they chose not to feature the language of Nokia itself. Just out of interest I would have liked to see it in Finnish... perhaps the original version?

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