Moscow, 19th September, 2007. We get a real kick out of all the badly localised advertising materials one sees these days. You get the idea at times that even automatic translation programs would hit the target more often. But we can say with 100% certainty that one company has managed to take great strides forward without putting its foot in it. And that’s Kerio Technologies.
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern and Kerio Technologies have a long history of productive cooperation and a list of successful projects. We both share and support wholeheartedly our client’s position regarding localisation: it can only be done well by creative specialists with a good feel for both languages and a profound understanding of the underlying technologies. Only then is it possible to avoid such gaffs in advertising copy as “wall of flame” instead of firewall, “initial code” instead of primary key and “panes” instead of windows. Ham-fisted translations – common among translation agencies in Russia – at best manage to avoid such glaring mistakes. But even where this is true, such a text has no power in advertising terms since it is still disconnected from the specifics of the target culture and language. It is possible to translate English into Russian verbatim, but the result sounds forced and unnatural. The correct way to approach this task is to understand the original text and to create something new in the target language which achieves all the objects of the original. This requires linguistic, creative, technical and marketing skills. And these are precisely what we bring to the table.
As part of the process of localising Kerio Technologies’ brochure, we took the company’s Kerio WinRoute Firewall and Kerio MailServer and rendered their presentation in the target language achieving a positive and strong impact on the native reader – analogous to that of the original in terms of effect, though with somewhat modified content. The solution we presented felt absolutely natural to the target audience and thus was free of any of the resistance which is characteristic of the simplistic translation approach we outlined earlier. This copy was brilliantly combined with a new visual presentation. Together, the copy and the new design achieved just the right kind of interest in the reader that the client was looking for. Now when its foreign potential customers are comparing solutions for firewalls and mail servers, Kerio Technologies knows its presentation will be attracting the right kind of attention for all the very best reasons.
