Note: This blog post was originally written in Japanese for our Japanese website. We used our machine translation platforms to translate it and post-edit the content in English. The original Japanese post can be found here.
Language is a powerful tool that connects people and cultures. By using words, we can express our thoughts, share knowledge, and communicate across borders. However, translating one language into another is more difficult than many imagine.
Now that technologies for handling language — such as machine translation tools and generative AI — have become familiar, taking a fresh look at mistranslation and misinterpretation can lead to more appropriate and richer communication. In this post, we introduce well-known cases of mistranslation and misinterpretation in recent years and, from the standpoint of a translation agency, consider measures to prevent them.
Cultural nuances and language play a vital role in international marketing. In the 1960s, a major beverage company entered a new overseas market. In its campaign at the time, the company used a slogan with the nuance of “Drink this and come back to life,” but when it was translated literally into the local language, it ended up being rendered as “This drink will bring your ancestors back from the dead.”
Slogans and taglines require particular care in translation, and translators need deep cultural understanding, excellent expressive skills, and a high level of expertise. Because it was translated literally, it ended up having a major impact on the brand’s image overseas.
Reference: China's Golden Week - A Good Time to Make Sure You Don't 'Bite the Wax Tadpole'
At Kawamura International, especially when translating marketing-related documents, in addition to the usual bilingual review comparing the source text and the translation, we ensure quality by adding a step in which a professional who is a native speaker of the target language reviews only the translation to refine it into natural expression (i.e., polishing the translation).
Similarly, for fields that require specialized knowledge, such as medical, legal, and IT, a step for expert review may also be included.
What follows is not a so-called translation error, but a case involving misinterpretation of language.
Social media has become one of the important means of sharing people’s safety and status when disasters occur. This is a global trend: when a major earthquake struck a country in Asia in the past, many people posted messages on major social media platforms to inform others of their own and their families’ safety. However, at that time, many messages automatically displayed animations of balloons and confetti, which should have been used for celebrations.
The cause lay in a local word used in the messages. In addition to meaning “survive” and “be safe,” it also meant “congratulations,” so the algorithm failed to grasp the context, resulting in unintended celebratory animations being displayed. The feature that automatically shows celebratory animations in response to messages like “Congratulations” is available in each language, but in that country, it was suspended for the time being.
This case involves a problem in which an algorithm misinterpreted a word with multiple meanings, and the weakness in interpreting polysemous words (meaning words with multiple different meanings) and homographs (meaning words with the same spelling but different meanings) also applies to the AI translation technologies that have become widely used in recent years.
At Kawamura International, when we work with machine translation, we have linguists review the output in a post-editing step to check such terms against the context. We can also improve translation accuracy by pre-editing the source text before running it through machine translation.
For example, by replacing polysemous words in advance with clearer expressions, or by converting hiragana words that could be interpreted in multiple ways into kanji (when translating from Japanese), you can prevent AI misinterpretation and make it easier to produce appropriate translations. In this way, by understanding the characteristics of each language and the weaknesses of AI, you can use machine translation more efficiently.
The two examples we introduced remind us of the complexity inherent in the seemingly simple yet highly sophisticated technology of interpreting words and translating them into another language.
Language is indispensable to human communication, but it can also be a source of misunderstanding. Mistranslations can lead to marketing failures, legal disputes, and even international conflicts. Even if machine translation and AI technologies advance significantly, these risks will not disappear unless people can use them appropriately.
As globalization accelerates, experienced professional translators play an indispensable role wherever accurate communication across language barriers is required.
Kawamura International is a translation agency founded and headquartered in Tokyo, Japan, with local offices in Hong Kong and the US.
As an ISO 17100-certified (international standard for translation services) translation company, we deliver high-quality translations not only for English and Japanese projects but also for multilingual translation projects in cooperation with our partner agencies whose quality has been recognized by global corporations.
We also have extensive experience in supporting the implementation of machine translation and post-editing work. If you are unsure about how to approach your translation project or are looking for a translation vendor that can flexibly collaborate with you, Kawamura International is here to help. Feel free to reach out to us with any questions.