First, I will say I have no problem with Spanish-speaking people or Spanish as a language.
I am curious as to the cost of making “everything” bilingual?
I was in Home Depot today and was looking at the signs everywhere, in both English and Spanish below. My question is, is it prohibitively expensive and/or a big hassle, in terms of adding labor hours, and the extra font size, or sign size, to make these bilingual modifications? I also would add that translations or meanings may vary among Spanish-speaking countries, so it may be a little extra work to find the best translation for the English.
I guess I could generalize my question to say “Do companies that have had to add bilingual modifications see it as a big deal?”
Personally, I have had to translate school handbooks from English into Spanish, and, while I was paid for my work, I did wonder both if I was really helping, and if the school I was working for saw this as necessary and worth the trouble of hiring me.
I rarely interact with people who know so little English that they can only say, “Sorry, no speak English” or something to that effect.
Is bilingual modification really necessary? And why don’t all companies do it? Do companies that have done it regret it, or conversely, claim that it has helped?
Are there people who think this is just another sign of Spanish speakers interfering with and diluting good ol’ fashioned English?
Any help you could give would be great! Love to know what you think.
I don’t know about the cost, but it must be a local thing. Here in northern Ohio I can’t recall ever seeing any Spanish signs. Most things I buy have the instructions in English, French and Spanish, perhaps others.
A large company could have all those signs translated just once. Even if they have to pay a person to be on staff to do the translations, or some translation firm a few hundred k to do them, if you divide that out by the number of stores Home Depot has (2200), it’s a drop in the bucket.
Most signage and labeling is re-worked frequently, so it would cost almost nothing to bilingualize the next generation of a sign or label. You probably see almost zero signs or labels in a typical day that have not been recomposed in the past year or so, so a sudden edict to bilingualize would have virtually no cost associated with it if it could be phased in over a year or so. All signs would be replaced over that span anyway.
Underline mine: for a hardware store, not really. There will be some differences but they’re as likely to happen between factories in the same town as between regions or countries. They’re also more likely to refer to specific items than to areas of the store. And if an item has both official names and slang or dialectal ones, the stores will use the official or more-widespread ones as much as possible.
Some countries have this problem. Canada has bi-lingual street signs as does Brittany and Wales. Translation can give rise to some laughs though - All official road signs in Wales are bilingual, so a local authority e-mailed its in-house translation service for the Welsh version of: “No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only”. The sign maker got a reply in Welsh that said “Nid wyf yn y swyddfa ar hyn o bryd. Anfonwch unrhyw waith i’w gyfieithu,” and duly painted it on the sign.
Unfortunately, it actually translates as “I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated”.
I would think a store, like Home Depot, would say “Hmmmm, if we spend $X to make signs bilingual, it will bring in $X + $Y money from people who only speak Spanish”
manson1972 is correct, the question is not how much they cost, the question is how much they make. If by printing prices in multiple languages stores make more than it costs they’ll be all over it.
Exactly, Home Depot is making a business decision and they have decided it’s worth it.
(Meanwhile, some of the articles in the shelves have bilingual package labels that apparently were printed in China by someone using their equivalent of a “The Spanish as She is Spoke” phrasebook.)
<Hungarian accent>I will not buy this Spanish, it is scratched.</Hungarian accent>
You see this marketing decision writ large in the trilingual* labeling and user documentation of stuff meant to be sold all over the Western Hemisphere. The last several consumer items I’ve bought had user manuals and warranty paperwork in English, French, and Spanish, and the last several assemble-it-yourself furniture items also had the multilingual assembly instructions.
Someone figured out the extra market reach was worth the cost of translation. It’s a rare business market analyst who gets this fairly straightforward kind of forecast wrong, so I bet it’s value-added.
*Or even more than 3. The last large appliance I bought had instructions and warranties in over a dozen languages, including both major forms of written Chinese (used in Taiwan and PRC), all four major Scandinavian languages (Swedish is surprisingly different from Norwegian), and all the EU languages. Simply amazing.
There’s a little, quaint, farming community outside of Philadelphia called Kennett Square. When I was in the town I was shocked by how many stores/banks/bars/etc had their signage in English and Spanish. Then I found out mushroom farming is a big thing there, and the mushroom mine laborers are mostly from Mexico.
It’s also going to be a lot easier to translate something like the signs in a hardware store than it is to do an entire article or book. The hard part of learning languages isn’t the vocabulary, it’s the grammar. But you don’t need to worry about that if you just need a sign that says “Lighting” or “Lumber” or “Garden”: Any fool with a Spanish-English dictionary can just look those words up.
In CA, where I live, if you walk onto a construction job site, most of the time you are going to hear Spanish, not English being spoken. I can see where the Home Depot stores would want to have bilingual signs (which all the ones around me do). I suspect they can be used in HD stores in Latin America, too.
My wife works for a major manufacturer of baking and decorating supplies. Her job is translating all the packaging materials, catalogs, promotional stuff, etc into Spanish and French (for Canadian consumers). She also does some general editing and stuff but that’s her core job. She gets paid around $60k. Plus some complicated translations she needs to send out for (mainly tricky French) which are maybe $100-$200 a pop. Three or four a week, call it another $40k. I’m sure there’s all sorts of intangibles harder to price such as delaying a package or having to reprint something with a bad translation, but if you said that they spend $150-$200k a year on translation services (for a company with around $500mil in revenue) you would probably be in the ballpark.
“Timber” in some parts of the world. That’s English, but that goes for other languages in general, too. Wasn’t it Microsoft who botched the translation of “female” in Venezuela? They used a term that’s offensive there, but not in most of the Spanish speaking world (“Hembra,” if I recall correctly.)
Nor do I, but the people we interact with are certainly not a random sampling. There are in fact quite a lot of people who can’t speak much or any English. Even the ones who can speak it pretty effectively can’t necessarily read it.
And, even if you can speak and read another language, you might still appreciate signage in your native language, both to be absolutely sure that you got the term right (Ok, wait, these are copper, but are they copper-plated, or solid…), and because it gives you more confidence that, if you get confused or need to drop back into your native language, you’re more likely to find someone who speaks it, or at least someone who won’t treat you like an “illegal”.
I know that if I were living in a foreign country, I’d be more likely to patronize a store that had English labels alongside, or an employee that spoke some English. And that would probably be true even if I was functionally literate in the local language.
I work for a company with several thousand stores in the US and revenue of many tens of billions. We send bilingual sign packages to about 10% of our stores (spread out across all our “markets”). It costs us an additional few hundred thousand a year to maintain this “offering” (all our sign production is outsourced). Between 0.1% and 0.3% of our marketing budget.
The translation of a radio ad costs less than the price of a 15 second spot on a major market Spanish language radio station.
I can almost guarantee that we get a return on our investment for this.