If you’re not familiar with brand name checking, effectively it’s doing due diligence on a new brand, product or company name to ensure it works in other languages.
If you launch a new brand and choose a name that doesn’t work in a market you go into later, then it’s an expensive exercise to rebrand something when your existing market is already familiar with its original name. Like Jif, which became Cif and Comfort, which became Cushelle.
There’s also the embarrassment of choosing a name that means something completely inappropriate in another language.
To give you an idea how this works here is one of our client’s brand name check case study.
Client: Based in Japan with a new product to launch globally.
Raw material: 206 possible names – and many more phrases and words associated with the product.
Countries to check: 21. Although more than one country may use the same language there are local versions to take into account. For example, Algeria, Bahrain, Libya, Mauritania, Morocco and Yemen all use Arabic, but each has subtle differences in usage.
Ghana, Mauritius and Zambia all use English – but each country has their own ‘version’, almost like a dialect that must be taken into account. Rwanda needed everything checking into both Kinyarwanda and Swahili.
Linguists involved: 39 linguists, all native speakers for the target languages.
In addition, there were some rare languages such as Dhivehi and Montenegrin and the client wanted two linguists for most target languages to ensure 100% clarity.
The challenges: The biggest challenge was the time zones. Not only was the client in Japan and our project manager was in the Turkish office with a time difference of six hours, but with linguists scattered all round the world, coordinating everything was a logistical nightmare!
The deadline was tight – with no wriggle room – which tested our project manager.
Successfully managing many linguists in different time zones, ensuring where two linguists were involved that their results were cross-matched and checked carefully and delivering on time proved that our project managers are the very best.
The pluses were that our linguist network is extensive, even in the more unusual languages – and they are familiar with the discipline of brand name checking.
TTC wetranslate completed this enormous project in only 5 days from start to finish!
