Monday 13 February 2012

Rolls for Breakfast

Well, here I am. at last a blogger. I will try to touch upon topics related to budget marketing and translation issues I faced in my years of experience and hope to bring some light to those of you who might be facing similar situations today.


Rolls for Breakfast
I was working for a company manufacturing die cutting machines that had metallic tubes,  where wall paper rolls, stickers and other paper rolls were placed for cutting. For one particular sales meeting, the sales managers were preparing a breakfast presentation for Spanish speaking prospective buyers and they asked me to translate "Rolls for Breakfast". It made sense in English, well at least to some extent, since breakfast rolls were served and the machines had metal rolls and paper rolls were used for demos, but the thing is, that no bread that I knew of was called "roll". In the end, the presentation had to be renamed for these customers, but I always remember it, because it never changes, people from different cultures and different languages still believe that translation is only a matter of translating words -but if that were true we could translate this little blogger piece using any automated online translator and see what comes up at the other end.

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