Who's translating your message?

Professional service marketers already understand the challenges of international translations - and the unspeakable pain when something comes out dreadfully wrong in another language.  With an increasing number of bloggers under their umbrellas, professional service marketers now must consider new challenges:  Incorrectly translated blog posts from one of your consultants, architects, accountants, lawyers or engineers, as described on a new blog post on EthicsCrisis.com  (a fascinating new blog that offers real people confessing their actual ethics lapses -- ouch).

As professional service marketing efforts become more viral, more personally-driven, increasingly built on the foundations of social networking and more global, this kind of PR landmine seems inevitable.

With all our efforts to control our firms' global messages (and all the brand managment that that implies!), combined with the advent of blogging and the lack of marketing control that that implies, I have to wonder whether it's possible to avoid, at the least, a message-translation landmine, and at the worst, a truly huge ethical disaster. 

Are professional service marketers actively addressing this new marketing frontier and its potential landmines?  (Or perhaps there is merit in waiting for the disaster to occur before we can drum up the urgrency to address it?) 

Comments

[B.L. Ochman]

I think we're doing more than tooting our own hown when we say that companies need to think about having a professional multilanguage translation company like SRF Global Translations on board along with a PR firm and other advisors.

As you've said, this situation will only grow as the Internet shrinks both the world and the amount of time it takes for news to spread.

Thanks so much for your kind words about Ethics Crisis.
B.L.