How a client’s “translation error” turned out to be a “cultural error.”

By David Dayton, Founder, Silk Road International

“These numbers don’t make sense, your translation must be wrong.”

This is what a client said to me when they couldn’t reconcile their internet-scraped data from Mainland China with what they were seeing from other Chinese-speaking countries.

The words in question were: nephew/niece. (Can you guess the real problem?)

The Situation

I had been hired to do contextual translations in 6 different Asian languages that would then be used to understand how people were talking about specific topics of interest to the client. To do the job, I worked with native speakers from different age cohorts in each language to make sure that not only did we have standard translations, but also slang and other colloquial terms used online.

The Friction Point

The client was frustrated that after they’d received the translations from me they had “inconsistent data” in a few of the vocab points they were collecting. They’d spent a week trying to justify the issue internally before bringing it to my attention. They shared with me how much time and money they’d spent trying to find and fix my “mistake,” but couldn’t. So they brought it back to me, again telling me they were sure that I’d translated something wrong. 

I told them the translations were not just my own work, but that of the cohort groups I had worked with. They still insisted that there was a translation error. So I changed tactics.

The (Cultural) Answer

I asked them, “Have you ever heard of the One Child Policy?” To which the manager responded, “Of course, what does that have to do with this?!”

I said, “The One Child Policy was basically enforced for 35 years. That means that in urban China there are at least two generations of people who do not have any nephews or nieces.”

Silence.

“Yea, well then what about aunt? We’re getting a lot of hits on that?”

Again, a little bit of cultural nuance clarified the problem; aunt or auntie is a common title used for non-related older women.

What Can You Do With This?

Data is awesome. But without cultural context the data is not just meaningless, but conclusions can be wrong, costing you time and money.

Eventually, the client realized that the translations were correct and moved forward with the data. But only after a week of spending money on double checking; looking for a problem that didn’t exist, simply because they had made cultural assumptions—that one Mandarin speaking area was going to cultural similar to another.

You may not think that you need cultural tools to understand data, but you’re missing the forest for the trees without it. On-the-ground cultural experience is essential for understanding what data actually means.

 This is what we do at Silk Road International: putting data, translations, and market research in cultural context, so the numbers mean what you think they mean—culture you can actually use! If your data from China or Southeast Asia isn’t adding up, contact SRI.