Anyone out in London recently may have spotted some odd mobile billboard advertising about. The pieces appear to be advertising well-known brands, but something is off. "Simply enact it," Nike says. "Maybe it's congenital," reads an ad for Maybelline.
The attention-grabbing campaign aims to raise awareness of a discipline that doesn't tend to get a lot of high-street advertising. And having worked in translation myself, l can vouch for the fact that it's 100% on the mark.
Devised by the translation and copywriting agency franklyfluent, the guerrilla ads feature deliberately bad rewrites of iconic brand slogans from Nike, Kellogg’s, B&Q, KFC, KitKat and Maybelline. They're direct translations of translations of the originals but lack the magic and sparkle, either because they use the wrong words for the context or use synonyms that have a different register.
Dubbed ‘Hard to Make, Easy to Break’, the campaign is accompanied by a website showcasing the broken slogans, and revealing the stories behind the original lines. The aim is to celebrate great brand writing, spotlighting the skill it takes to create a timeless, memorable slogan.
The butchered phrases show what can happen when a tagline is translated from one language to another without considering register, tone of voice and the connotations of each word. This is a mistake something that's becoming more common due to the rise of AI-powered automatic translation. Some less exacting brands think they can cut costs and get away without hiring a translator. But often nobody involved is familiar enough with the target language to be able to judge the quality of the translation, so they end up putting blind faith in the tech with little awareness of how negative the impact can be. How much room for error can there be in a three-word slogan? A lot.
Catherine Barr, co-founder of franklyfluent, says: “More than ever brands need to cross borders. But translating creative copy is about more than getting the meaning right. It’s about capturing the texture and tone of the work in a way that resonates with local audiences. Get it wrong, and you end up with copy like the ‘broken’ slogans at the centre of our campaign – that says what you meant to say, but not how you meant to say it. It’s something we wanted to bring to life for everyone, whether or not they speak another language.”
Would people think Nike was cool if it spoke like a government legal advisor? Would people be as keen on Maybelline if it sounded like a physician? Probably not. Brands that spend weeks and months debating, testing and honing the perfect slogan in language one and and then expect translate it into 30 languages five minutes before sign off should take note.
For more clever billboard campaigns, see how Corona turned stock photos into clever optical illusions.
