To reach
global markets means going beyond translation, says San Diego expert
By Michael
Abrams
This lesson
from the annals of international misunderstanding comes silently from
Claudia J. Kellersch. With an impish smile breaking out, she curls
her index finger till it meets the thumb, while she raises the remaining
digits in a three-fingered fan.
When a cabbie
flashes that at you on a crowded street in Berlin or Freiburg, it doesn't
mean you're A-OK. Instead, it means that the cabbie is certain that you
are an opening in the rump unmentionable in polite conversation, Claudia
says.
That's funny.
But the joke was on the United States company that peppered the product
documentation of a software package it was newly exporting to Germany
with the unfortunate hand sign. Worse yet, the symbol was embedded in
the graphical user interface of the software itself. It appeared in popup
menus and toolbars, guaranteeing that clients in Germany would regularly
be reminded of who really is a you know what. The fix meant rewriting
the source code and recompiling, and that ran into money.
Claudia is a high-tech translator, conference interpreter, and consultant on product internationalization and localization. She moved to San Diego last February to be with her husband, Blair, a scientist who designs oceanographic equipment.
Claudia first arrived in the United States in 1993, after graduating from the University of Heidelberg with masters degrees in Simultaneous Conference Interpretation and Technical Translation. Microsoft moved her to the Seattle area to join in the German localization effort for Excel version 5.
A year later,
Claudia set up her own business, into German™, which she now runs
out of an office in her home in La Jolla. She has counted among her clients
companies from Adobe to Iomega.
Business
remains great, she says, despite the tech downturn, as American companies
look to bolster revenues by focusing on Germany, the biggest single national
market in Europe.
Claudia's
skill set goes far beyond translating documentation, which is itself an
art, to the more complex task of helping United States companies avoid
the pitfalls of ignoring German national, regional, and local sensibilities.
She also assists vendors in meeting medical software testing requirements.
It's not
just United States companies that get tripped up. Most Germans speak pretty
good English; but that advantage blew up in the face of a manufacturer
of staubsaugers, or vacuum cleaners (literally "dust suckers").
The German marketing team, overconfident of its English knowhow, cleared
ad copy that ran in United States magazines and proudly boasted about
one of the new machines: "It really sucks!"
Claudia is new to San Diego but not to STC. She joined the Puget Sound Chapter of STC shortly after setting up her company, when STC held its annual conference in Seattle in 1996. So Seattle's loss is our gain, and that's A-OK with me!
