No Entiendo

It means "I don't understand" in Spanish, and it's how the rapidly growing non-English-speaking population across New England often reacts to American companies' catchy or clever marketing campaigns. Meet the translators.

By Keith O'Brien  |  July 23, 2006

Lucas Guerra, a native of Argentina, opened a tiny graphic design shop in Boston in 1994. Three years later, he joined forces with Zamawa Arenas, from Venezuela, and together they turned Argus into a full-service advertising agency with an increasingly relevant specialty. Their focus: helping clients reach the region's growing immigrant markets, especially Latinos.

The 2000 Census showed a 49 percent increase in the state's Latino population since 1990. How did Massachusetts businesses react?

ZA: A higher level of awareness. But the commitment wasn't there yet. I believe that it was after 2005, 2004, it became more obvious not only to the corporate sector, but to the nonprofi t sector, that there was a need to do something. There was a sense of: Latino, Latino. Like Ricky Martin. All that kind of Latino craziness.

LG: And then people started realizing that they have a different buying power.

How much money are we talking about?

ZA: There's $212 billion in buying power in Massachusetts. And $6.7 billion of that is Latino-Hispanic buying power, about 3 percent.

What does that mean exactly, $6.7 billion in buying power?

ZA: Latinos are buying homes. Latinos are buying cars. Latinos are buying consumer goods, entertainment.

LG: But at the end of the day, it comes down to opportunity. Because not everyone is targeting these populations. So if you are one of the few that's going after these populations, then there's great opportunity.

You cite statistics showing that nationally, Latino buying power increased 130 percent between 1990 and 2002. Is that fast growth expected to continue?

ZA: I've been reading stats, and it's in the 50 percent range.

LG: But in a perfect world, 20 years from now, we would want to be talking about a multicultural market, rather than just Latino buying power. Because these generations will have assimilated. It will be about their identity. And then it will be harder to break it down like that.

ZA: It should be seamless, you know? I think eventually we should put ourselves out of business. Seriously.

Why does an advertiser need an intermediary to reach a Latino or other cultural market?

ZA: It started with language, the use of language. It's been documented a lot. Just faux pas: Perdue Chicken, Nova. All these different examples that just missed the mark.

How?

ZA: The name Nova itself is N-O, V-A. That, in Spanish, means "doesn't go."

LG: No go.

ZA: So a car that's being sold where the name says, essentially, it doesn't work, is defi nitely a faux pas. And Perdue chicken had something about - I can't remember the line, but it was something about a tender chicken. And the way it translated, it had some sexual connotation.

LG: But there are hundreds like this.

So you can't just translate an advertising pitch into another language?

ZA: Not really. I think that's been the tradition, and it can work for certain types of messages. But it doesn't fully work. So it's really not about translating language, but trans-creating or transforming concepts so that they are relevant to that market.

Give an example of "trans-creating" that worked.

ZA: We can talk about KeySpan. They hired us last summer to do their Hispanic marketing and to really focus on the New York market and New England. We looked at how they were branding themselves and positioning themselves, and recognized that the tag line that they have in English does not work in the Latino market.

What's their sales pitch in English?

ZA: "Climate is everything." Doesn't translate.

LG: If you were to translate it straight up, it would mean "Weather is everything," which in Spanish is not a concept that you would grasp - that inside a home there's a climate?

ZA: So our direct-mail campaign was really focused on the family, because the family is such an important aspect of the Latino culture, and we wanted people to convert their heating system to natural gas. So the whole concept revolved around family and warmth of home. And that was the tag line in Spanish: "Calor de hogar." Warmth of home.

And how do you know if you've been successful?

ZA: The response rate to the campaign. I can't share numbers, but [they] were twice that of the general market in terms of response rate. Which was, for them, huge.

How many languages have you worked in?

ZA: Predominantly, it's been English, Spanish, Portuguese, and Haitian. In addition, Chinese, Khmer, Vietnamese, Russian.

Do you speak Khmer?

ZA: No. But we have someone who does.

Keith O'Brien is a frequent contributor to the magazine. E-mail him at keith@keithob.com.