“Avisos” or “Anuncios”?

Mar 22, 2006

Thanks, Andy for inviting me to contribute to the Search Technology area. Well, since this is my first post, this one is a bit informal. I’ll try to use a reporting style in my next one.
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El Nuevo Día (http://www.endi.com) from Puerto Rico, one of the most important newspapers in the Caribbean region, is featuring today a Google AdWords banner that reads in part:

“Crea tus avisos.”

This is bad translation and worse copy.

The term “avisos” is not a valid translation for “ads” nor appeals to the larger audience of countries from the Caribbean and Latin America for which the term “avisos” implies “notificaciones” (“notifications”) not “ads”.

The correct translation for “ads”, and abstraction from “advertisements”, is “anuncios”.

This might sound ironic to an english speaker who might be tempted to translate “anuncios” as “announcements” since “to announce” in spanish means “anunciar” (as in “I’m going to announce.”, “Voy a anunciar.”)

“Announcements”, on the other hand not necessarily implies “ads” in spanish even when in english “announce” has the following synonyms: advertise , broadcast , declare , proclaim , promulgate , publish (Source: http://education.yahoo.com/reference/dictionary/entry/announce). This illustrates that one cannot blindfoldly trust even online dictionaries.

Thus, a more correct creative for the above Google AdWords banner should be

“Crea tus anuncios.”

In fact, clicking the Google banner sends users to http://adwords.google.com.pr/select/ which reads in part:

“Con AdWords de Google puede crear sus propios anuncios…”

Evidently the above Google Adwords banner is a case of incorrect copy. This example underscores the fact that even companies with large human resources can fail to produce valid creatives. Merely resting on dictionaries or outsourcing a local “expert” to do translations is not enough.

Unless a campaign is intentionally designed to target a specific sub-audience or sector, all English-to-Spanish translations must be free from regionalisms, from Puerto Rico, Mexico, Spain or any country from that matter. In this way the campaign can appeal to the larger audience of spanish speaking countries. Why am I mentioning all this?

Well, the problem of regionalisms is a pervarsive one when it comes to online marketing and market reach. I am currently designing a database of spanish regionalisms and frequently used stopwords across countries -like most frequently used prepositions and articles, etc as they are used in different informational vehicles (newspapers, SE optimized websites, press releases, etc).

The goal is to feed a neutral spanish stemmer I already developed. Any suggestions are welcome. A Unicode mapper of international characters has been already embedded but is limited for now to spanish strings.

Orion

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