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News from
abroad - the challenge of producing bi-lingual packs in Hong
Kong
by Sean Triner
 When it
comes to raising funds, Pareto has found that what works in one
country is highly likely to work just as well in another. Despite
the differences that exist between cultures, what motivates donors
to give is similar the world over. If you treat them with the
respect and gratitude they deserve, and you express your case for
support clearly and with genuine emotion, then it doesn’t matter if
they are Australian or Andorran – they’ll help you if they
can.
However, that doesn’t mean that a fundraiser can
simply set up shop in another country and expect to work in exactly
the same way as they did back home. For whilst basic human
psychology may be universal, language is not. And when the local
population speaks two different languages, as they do in Hong Kong,
communicating with supporters presents a unique set of
challenges.
This is something that Pareto Account
Manager, Alice Farkas, knows all about. Based in our Hong Kong
office, where donors are as likely to speak Cantonese as they are
English, fundraising is a bi-lingual business. And as Alice
discovered, this makes putting together a successful appeal
anything but a straightforward process:
“Pareto’s communications are designed
to take donors on a highly controlled emotional journey. Whether we
are talking about direct mail or telephone scripts, we want the
story we tell donors to unfold as carefully as a Hollywood script –
to have drama, emotion and light-hearted moments in all the right
places.
It’s not just about content, its about order.
And when we received our first Traditional Chinese translation of
an appeal written with Hong Kong Cancer Fund, we very quickly
realised that you simply cannot expect copy that flows brilliantly
in English to work in Chinese.”
Although our copywriter delivered a
brilliant English version of the letter, the first draft we
received from the translator was a very literal, word-for-word
Traditional Chinese version.
With
the help of our local Cantonese-speaking experts, Alice saw at once
that the letter – which read so well in its original form – had
lost much of its passion, its energy and its emotion translation.
In short, it had lost what made it a Pareto letter, and it simply
wasn’t good enough.
Yet
nor was it appropriate to simply write two different versions of
each mailing. For one thing, the costs would have been
prohibitively high for our clients. And for another, it would have
made it impossible to carry out tests and analyse appeal
performance if the contents were not the same in each
language.
It
was a tricky problem, which Alice and the team solved by
introducing a fundamental change in the way that Pareto worked with
its translators. Instead of treating them like functionaries as
most companies do, they were brought into the creative fold and
given the same comprehensive briefing as our copywriters and
designers:
“The idea was that with a thorough
grounding in what the appeal needed to communicate and the story we
wanted to tell the donor, a sensitive translator should be able to
make the editorial decisions necessary to maintain the flow and the
integrity of the pack.”
It
was a strategy that proved an instant success. The next Cantonese
version of the Hong Kong Cancer Fund pack was every bit as
compelling as the English language original. And the good news is
that, with the pack about to lodge, next time round we will be able
to tell you just how our first bi-lingual pack has
performed.
For
further information on working with Pareto Works, please contact
Sean Triner on Sean.triner@paretofundraising.com | 