Afrikaans advertising slipping towards mediocrity?

Gold Pendoring: Draftfcb Cape Town's “Paleis/Pandok” for Die Burger

click to enlarge

Why does the issue of language in advertising arouse such strong feelings? What are some of the complexities involved? Folio invited me to open a window on their perspective, outlining some of the challenges that professional language practitioners experience in this regard.

Afrikaans readers who are passionate about their language have probably noticed that their daily newspapers feature mostly Afrikaans advertisements, but sometimes an English ad, or worse, a bit of an English ad, such as a headline, slogan or a payoff line, will suddenly creep in somewhere.

This might be in an ad in the middle pages of a supplement or on a page deep inside the main body of the paper. All too often English pamphlets and brochures are inserted into Afrikaans dailies. Then there are the Anglisismes that crop up in copy that has not been properly translated by a professional Afrikaans mother-tongue translator.

Adding insult to injury

Adding insult to injury, shocking grammatical and spelling mistakes. In mid-November 2011, Die Burger featured a large ad for a new "yskaatsbaan" (ysskaatsbaan). This unforgivable spelling mistake appeared in a big bold headline!

Who knows how many readers have objected to poorly translated advertising text from companies who are trying to sell them their goods and services? If they feel sufficiently insulted, they'll simply avoid those purveyors.

Says Marli Viljoen of Folio Translation Consultants, "Carelessness like this is disrespectful to the Afrikaans consumer. Advertisers should be aware that Afrikaans-speakers and speakers of all the other indigenous languages of South Africa are fiercely loyal to their respective languages.

"After all, they face an ongoing battle for cultural preservation in the face of English hegemony. This is not only the problem of Afrikaans, but of virtually all languages internationally. In particular, it is the smaller ones [which] are the most threatened, partly because they are regarded as economically less viable. This perception is often based on assumption rather than statistics."

Buying power

The buying power of Afrikaans-speaking consumers is a force to be reckoned with in the South African economy. Approximately six million people speak Afrikaans as a first language, which accounts for 13% of the population. Almost half of this group are middle- and high-income earners, with an LSM rating of 9 or 10. Recent research has revealed that 18% of Afrikaans households have a household income in excess of R25 000 per month.

This situation creates a dilemma for media executives. At Media24, which has many Afrikaans titles in its stable, including Beeld and Rapport, a policy of "Only Afrikaans ads for Afrikaans platforms" has long been in place. This would imply a commitment to translated or transcreated advertising copy, as well as recognition of the power and potential of Afrikaans as a language of creativity.

However, the policy is very difficult to implement, partly because of pressure from certain monolingual advertisers who do not understand the value to their brand of translating advertisements that have been created in English. Stepping up to the plate by refusing to accept such ads for Afrikaans titles can have a disastrous impact on advertising revenue.

Trends

In the early stages of the digital revolution, how is this playing out on our screens? A quick survey of the home pages of the websites of several Afrikaans titles revealed some interesting trends.

• Huisgenoot: Two out of three ads were in Afrikaans and one in English. However, all the packaging and label copy of the products being advertised is in English, creating a visual hiccup.

• Rooi Rose: Five out of seven product ads around the border of the page were in Afrikaans and two in English. Ditto the remark above about the product labels.

• Die Burger: This home page scored an apparently immaculate score four out of four ads in Afrikaans but, oops, all the property listings are in English! And another oopsie - the dating page is headed in English "Men, Women, Search" but the messages are in Afrikaans. Lower down, the happenings section is an unsightly mengsel of Afrikaans and English.

• Nuus24.com: Note what comes up in the search bar after entering "Nuus24.com" into Google: 'Afrikaans.news24.com'.

  On this home page, four out of five ads were in Afrikaans and one was in English, for brides from the Ukraine! The Afrikaans ads often typified corporate advertising that is willing to translate the text of the message, but unwilling to translate the company name or slogan.

• Sake24.com: The home page features one ad in Afrikaans and three in a mixture of both languages. Upon going further into the site, by pressing on the Finweek icon, all the ads on the day of this survey were in English. (Such choices should perhaps be reexamined in the light of research which has shown that financial services are regarded as an important sector by Afrikaans consumers.)
  Most of these sites feature, in the lower right-hand corner, an endorsement of membership of the DMMA "Member Digital Media and Marketing Association". No attempt to translate this for the Afrikaans-speaking public!

The more salacious the publication, the less attention is paid to language purity in the advertising. Perhaps they reckon the viewers are so steamed up they don't care:

• Loslyf: A horrible mixture of Afrikaans and English copy - about 50% each.

• Stokstyf: Worst record of all - seven out of seven ads in English!

• Die Son: Arguably guilty of writing down to its readers with liberal usage of English words in the editorial content, let alone the advertising. For example, a headline reading: "Bieber maak baba-vrou en lawyers bang." The article was peppered with legal terms such as "bogus claims" and "paternity lawsuits", setting a poor example for a supposedly Afrikaans newspaper.

Tip of the iceberg

Powerful advertisements such as the trophy-winners in the recent Pendoring Awards might suggest that all is well in the world of Afrikaans advertising, but unfortunately ads such as these represent the snowflake at the tip of the iceberg.

The winner of the 2011 print ad section was Draftfcb for client Die Burger, showing a homeless man sleeping under a newspaper with a headline that screamed "Malema bou16M Paleis". The visual impact of this ad was enormous, the verbal impact, somewhat less.

The project managers at Folio Translation Consultants based in Pepper Street, Cape Town, are at the coalface and they say that standards in Afrikaans advertising are slipping steadily.

Taken seriously

MD Philip Zietsman recollects a time when the matter of accessing the Afrikaans-speaking target market was taken seriously. "The creative department of advertising agencies would consult the Afrikaans translators from the outset. We'd be asked whether a concept would work in Afrikaans and, if not, they'd have to come up with an alternative creative strategy."

What are the other problems that routinely crop up with regard to Afrikaans advertising or more specifically, the translation of English advertisements into Afrikaans that contribute to the steady erosion of quality?

English > Afrikaans is used for the sake of convenience in the following examples, but similar problems undoubtedly occur when translating ads into the remaining nine official languages of SA:

• Both digital and print publications seem to be filled to the brim with flat, ordinary, mundane translations of advertisements. In the worst cases, ads will feature a 'dumbed-down' style of Afrikaans. Rather than pay a professional translator a tiny fraction of the overall cost of the campaign, clients will ask employees or friends, who may be able to speak the language but are by no means professional language practitioners, to translate the ad copy.

• Grammatical errors are not unknown. Let's say that for three English words 'Welcome study pack', one Afrikaans word is the correct translation: 'Verwelkomingstudiepakket'. But the layout of the ad doesn't allow for such a long word, so experiments are made with hyphenation: 'Verwelkoming-studie-pakket' or 'Verwel-komingstudie-pakket'.

  Fonts are reduced and tempers are lost. Then finally, the translators come across the actual ad to find that the designer has clearly thought 'to hell with it - I hate these hyphens', resulting in three Afrikaans words being used. This is sure to grate on the eye of the reader.

• Agencies have unrealistic deadlines for translation. Zietsman describes a typical scenario: "Recently we had to creatively translate an English ad into Afrikaans, but we were only given 30 minutes to do it. So, we wrote it in 30 minutes (a group effort with three people dropping all other work and concentrating on the crisis). But when we made the deadline, the agency's disappointing response was that it was not creative enough! So we all dashed back to the drawing board once again and worked against the clock. We were proud of our achievement, a translation which was headlined as follows: 'Having an appetite for investing is different to having the stomach for it.' Afrikaans 'transcreation', bearing in mind the theme of digestive tract: 'Is jou beleggersblaf groter as jou beleggersbyt?'"

  As with most creative work, it seems so effortless on the surface, but of course it is anything but:

  • Agencies rarely provide a brief along with the short-order translation requirement. The translation might then be rejected on account of being too formal or too casual in style.

  • After submission of the translated ad copy, changes are made to it in-house, without referring it back to the translators. The risk here is that in-house editors, often the DTP operators, who are not mother-tongue speakers of Afrikaans, might make spelling and other grammatical mistakes, resulting in a flawed final product.

Bottom line

The bottom line? Companies should realise that, by creating original copy in Afrikaans and all the other languages of their target markets, or at the very least having it professionally translated, they're investing in their brands and building valuable brand loyalty.

Pendoring Awards GM Franette Klerck puts it succinctly: "As the impact of a commercial message in a target market's home language is so much greater, marketers who heed this truth should reap rich financial benefits".

Note: This article was written by Andrea le Sueur on behalf of Folio Translation Consultants, Cape Town.