Language barriers
There is one thing that seems to thwart a good social media strategy more than any other…language. If you happen to be developing and implementing strategy for somewhere with just one mother tongue, then fantastic ideas appear to be relatively simple to operationalise. Engagement sans alienation.
However, if your territory happens to be mainland Europe, you can easily be looking at upwards of 34 languages just to cover the major destinations-with a number of countries operating multiple languages in themselves. Now, you’d be forgiven for thinking that this might be a bit of a dampener where your plans for sparking conversation are concerned. I know that’s certainly how I’ve felt. The best laid plans, ultimately shaken by linguistics.
But there are ‘solutions’. A number of big players (receiving investment from the biggest players-we’re looking at you WPP) are developing platforms which allow for central control (with regional permissions) on social media platforms, in order to create regional satellite profiles in local language.
However, no one has really cracked that translation nut yet. It remains hugely time consuming and manual to translate content in this way – with a central composer and numerous local translators. Even the mighty google can’t configure a translation tool that is accurate or reliable enough to deal with the huge number of variables in that particular situation. So ‘pushing’ central content isn’t flawless and it involves a massive human resource component, it’s a step forward but it’s not quite there.
An alternative in the form of a separate presence per locale on all the social media platforms you frequent just spells fragmentation (and if you read between the lines ‘loads and loads of work’). So is there another solution on the horizon? Not as far as I can see…currently we’re in a ‘leaves on the track’ situation, we know where we want to go but, despite all of the available technology and the fact that this could have been anticipated, we’re not quite there yet (and we mat be waiting a while).
