The second season of “Alabama, Inc” wraps up tonight on your local Alabama Public Television station. The APR newsroom is collaborating on this television show about business by focusing on translation. Alabama is home to companies that do business in German, Japanese, French and so on. I'll profile a Huntsville entrepreneur who has the job of keeping all those languages clear…
“How do you say it’s raining cats and dogs in…. say Spanish or French?"
That’s not your everyday headache at the office-- Unless you work at Foreign Language Service in Huntsville. Caroline Meyers is President and Co-founder. “We have a native French speaker, and she goes ‘never mind, just say it’s a deluge.”
Meyers’ company writes technical manuals and provides interpreters in eighty different languages. When she got started in 1979, Meyers’ staff used hardbound foreign language dictionaries and typed their work on IBM Selectric typewriters. She says that was back during the Cold War and the type of jobs they got reflected that…
“There was a lot of work with DOD (Defense of Defense,) with the government, with the Air Force, the Army, because we were basically in Cold War, the Iron Curtain hadn’t come down, the Berlin Wall hasn’t come down.”
Stories abound on businesses that try to translate what they do in foreign countries and the results are less than successful… Okay, Pepsi-Cola is one. The story goes the soft drink giant wanted to move into China and keep its slogan, "come alive with the Pepsi generation." The problem was that slogan reportedly translated into Chinese as “the drink that raises your ancestors from the dead…”
Another translation chestnut reportedly involved Kentucky Fried Chicken. Their slogan about their chicken being “finger lickin’ good” supposedly suggested that Chinese customers eat their fingers. Caroline Myers says she sometimes has to have heart to heart talks with customers on what will work and what won’t in foreign countries. “It’s called localization,” she says. “And, a lot of times we want to re-work the English before we even try to translate it.”
But, even knowing two or more languages and being really good at it doesn’t mean you’re going to be a good translator, at least not as Caroline Myers sees it. She says there’s a lot of creativity that goes into taking something written in English and making sure nothing is…pardon the phrase…lost in translation…
“I think a translator not only has to have the bilingual skills, also the technical skills, but also be a writer. They have to really know how to manipulate the language to stay close to what the original says, but be able to say it fluently in the language they’re going into.”
And Foreign Language Services works on technical manuals, legal documents, governmental contracts, and marketing—in eighty different languages. Finding people to do that job is tricky as well. Myers says she can’t just put an ad in the newspaper to find somebody who can translate in Japanese. She says sometimes her best hires comes after networking in the community or even around the office…
“If I say to a translator, say I need you to do this engineering manual done, and that person looks at me and says it’s not my field, I say well do you know anybody who you work with that could refer me to. And that’s one way I find them, and sometimes they’re the best.”
And, that job became even harder when Myers and her staff branched out from translating documents into interpreting for foreign language speakers. That put Myers into the position of dealing with disaster survivors and victims of domestic violence. I’ll talk with Caroline Myers about how she got from here to there, on Alabama, Inc. on your local Alabama Public Television station.
