Vol/XX No/X 2007
MONTH/MONTH The Linguist 11
FEATURES
Negotiating the cultural and linguistic challenges of translating
iPhone materials for the Chinese market. By Tong King Lee
China's slice of
the apple
T
he global advertising strategies of
Apple Inc in Greater China (China,
Hong Kong and Taiwan) provide
an interesting example of the field of
globalisation, internationalisation, localisation
and translation (GILT). This field is
fundamentally about companies repackaging
their products and services to appeal to
specific locales, and is most frequently
associated with websites, video games,
software and other digital platforms,
though it is not restricted to technological
products and e-commerce alone.
Apple's official website has many local
incarnations all over the world. What is
interesting, in the case of Greater China, is
that instead of one generic Chinese version
used throughout the three Sinophone
regions, there is a further tier of localisation,
with variations built into the mainland China
(MC), Hong Kong (HK) and Taiwan (TW)
versions. An advertisement in English
can therefore be translated into more
than one Chinese-language
version, sometimes
with significant
differences.
But why do that? Wouldn't it be more
cost-effective to use one version across all
three Chinese regions? Since localisation is
an investment there must be a sound reason
and this is found in the differentiated use of
the Chinese language within Greater China.
Take, for example, the tagline for iPhone 7:
'This is 7'. The force of this tagline lies in its
absolute simplicity, using the bare
number 7 to stand in for the name of the
model. It seems almost too easy to
translate it into any language. And,
indeed, the versions for MC (7, 在此;
'7, is here') and TW (就是 7; 'Simply
7') reproduce the terse form of
the English. The HK version,
however, reads 這, 就是 iPhone7
('This, is simply iPhone 7'). Apart
from the insertion of a comma
after the Chinese word for 'This',
the structure is also palpably
longer. It appears to have
missed the rhetorical point of
substituting '7' for 'iPhone
7', making the tagline
less crisp than
the original.
©
SHUTTERSTOCK
