Abstract
The language used in a product or service has an extraordinary impact on the creation of its brand and on its online success. As localization is a key aspect of a globalized business, attention should be given to the localization of brand language to ensure global consistency. This study explores brand language localization problems in an online help corpus. Specifically, it analyzes the problems posed by the localization of brand names and terms in the pre-translation phase, following Nord’s pre-translation text analysis theory (2012). The main objective of the study is to understand the nature of identified brand language problems (professional purposes) and examine them (research purposes). The method implemented is a qualitative, interpretative analysis of a monolingual corpus in English comprising representative extracts from the Dropbox and Google Drive Online Help systems. The study is part of a wider research project exploring the concept of localization problems in online help localization.
Highlights
Websites have become an essential component of companies’ marketing campaigns thanks to their impact on the online projection of the corporate image (Maroto/De Bortoli 2001: 6)
With the exception of work like Wehrmeyer (2014) and Hubscher-Davidson (2011), Grounded Theory (GT) has not been widely exploited in Translation Studies, but it has been extensively used in other disciplines such as Sociology, which require the qualitative treatment of corpora
Of the 2,559 localization problems identified in the analyzed ONHELP corpus, 486 were identified as potential brand language problems (De la Cova 2017)
Summary
Websites have become an essential component of companies’ marketing campaigns thanks to their impact on the online projection of the corporate image (Maroto/De Bortoli 2001: 6). For example, are often used to publicize brands and attract new customers (Wang et al 2016). It appears logical to assume that the language used in this type of apps plays, or has the potential to play, an important role in the product’s success, mainly because it is the language itself that forges the brand. For this reason, companies should not under-prioritize decisions regarding the language used in their campaigns and products, but instead consider language as just another marketing tool, both in the original design phase and when translating it or adapting it for other markets
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