Dentists, Jelly Beans, and Saws: Don’t let this happen to you

Dave L
April 4, 2025
4:48 pm
0 comments

Dentists, Jelly Beans, and Saws: Don’t let this happen to you

Since these disconnects can happen to you, advanced warning can help prevent them:

Potential Liability and Brand Confusion

Problem: Over many of our 34 years, we have provided translations into many EU languages for Dentsply, the world’s largest dental supply firm. Whatever implements go into your mouth or occupy dentists’ exam rooms likely come from Dentsply’s divisions.

One day after we had delivered a multilingual instruction manual, our client liaison called wondering why the original English had four bullet points while the Danish version had five.

Our quick review discovered that Dentsply’s Danish distributor added a claim that the US office knew nothing about.

Solution: Dentsply was totally correct reverting to us. In many cases, reviewers – overseas suppliers, distributors, sales reps or others – add to, subtract from, or modify the translated versions. While reviewers may culturally adapt the text – which our professional linguists also do – they should not be changing the translations without their main office’s permission.

Reviewers’ edits, however well intended, leave the client company exposed to lawsuits if any claims are disputed. Our job is to:

a) assume that the HQ knows how they want their products presented; and to

b) translate the original text as faithfully as possible.

In our experience, clients should NOT rely on overseas offices to translate, because:

they can insert or omit claims that the client is liable for; and because
distributors in different countries can translate the same term inconsistently.

Do you want brand uniformity or brand confusion?

Should One Size Fit All?

Problem: Also years ago we were asked to translate the menu for Jelly Belly, a maker of jelly beans. The menu was small and simple -- around 35 flavors to go into many languages. But some of our translators refused, saying, “No self-respecting Dane would ever eat a popcorn-flavored jelly bean.” [Problems with the Danes again!] The Hebrew and other teams also objected to other flavors for similar reasons.

Solution: While we advised Jelly Belly to acculturate its flavor menu for specific countries, ultimately, the client wanted all 35 flavors for all countries.

Unqualified Reviewers

Problem: The Diamond Industrial Saw company asked us to translate its manual into Spanish. We delivered on time and the client printed the manual for its Mexican distributor. Weeks later the client came back to us irate; the distributor rejected the manual due to spelling, grammar and word-usage mistakes.

Solution: When we compared our version to the distributor’s version, we quickly learned why: Miguel had injected lots of changes to our translation without the client asking us first to verify that his edits were correct. And who was Miguel? The saw company’s Mexican warehouse worker with at best a 5th grade education.

Conclusions

Only clients’ qualified native-speaking linguists who speak the needed technical terminology should review translations. And then, always send any edits back to us for final approval. We have no problem with clients’ preferred (often in-house) terminology. But we will ensure that the edits contain no amateur spelling, grammar or punctuation errors. After all, how many Americans can write English sentences correctly?

AI translation programs also make mistakes, both comical and serious. When accuracy is required, only our kind of hybrid AI + professional-translator editing will produce precision.

BLOOPERS

These bilingual examples wonderfully illustrate unqualified or amateur translator mistakes:

Sign in a Turkish lavatory translated as, “Please help us save water. Press Flush button twice.”
Sign in a Mexican lavatory translated as, “It is forbidden to trow nothing down the toilet.”
Sign in an Indian airport translated as, “Eating carpet strictly prohibited.”

When you want your manuals, contracts, courses, websites, videos, etc. done correctly, please contact Auerbach International for a free quote from or into our 120 languages.

Thank you!

Sincerely,