Last month, Transpanish posted an article about using Neutral Spanish to reach the widest possible Spanish-speaking audience. Those who translate documents into neutral or standard Spanish strive to remove any vocabulary or markers that would identify the text with a specific region where Spanish is spoken. Using neutral Spanish is useful when your document will get distributed in more than one country.
But if your goal is to market a product or spread your message in the U.S., you may want to consider a more tightly targeted translation. Rather than trying to reach all Spanish-speakers in the U.S., you should work with your translation agency to define the demographic you want to reach so as to make your message more potent.
Are you selling real estate to educated immigrants in Florida? Promoting a new cell phone plan to young urban Puerto Ricans in New York? Or informing first-generation Mexican immigrants in the Southwest of the importance of prenatal care?
All of these groups speak Spanish with a different vocabulary, different idioms, and slightly different speech patterns. The short, snappy sentences that will sell a cell phone plan to young Puerto Ricans may turn off older immigrants from South America. The tone that gets your business new customers looking to retire will be too stuffy for the younger crowd.
Of course, attention to your audience is always important in any kind of writing. When you’re not only trying to target your intended audience, but also trying to make sure that the target text is faithful to the source, the expertise of your translation agency becomes even more critical. This is especially true if you don’t speak or understand Spanish, as you have to completely trust that the contracted agency has the knowledge necessary to create a translation that targets your specific demographic.
Related Articles
Researching Neutral Spanish Terms and Dialect-Specific Terms
Reaching Your Spanish-Speaking Audience with Global Translations
The Use of Neutral Spanish for the U.S. Hispanic Market
The idea of a ‘neutral’ language is interesting, if not controversial. It is rather a loaded term as neutral seems to mean, in my opinion, a language lacking a certain quality. What is this quality it is supposed to lack? Does a ‘neutral’ language have ‘neutral’ speakers? Is it a viable alternative?
I’ve been in the translation industry for years, and have heard about the elusive neutral Spanish several times, but it doesn’t seem to be used for other languages with variants. For example, I’ve never heard of neutral French that would eliminate terms used specifically by speakers in France, Canada, Belgium, etc. Or Portuguese in Portugal and Brazil. And for English, we normally ask translators to choose British or American, not somewhere in between. Why is this true for Spanish?
Obviously the belief that costs can be reduced by using one translation for all Speakers of a language is part of the reason, but it’s an interesting topic.
Glenn