When it comes to colors, there is the comon example of white which is in general associated with purity in western cultures, but in countries like China and Japan it is associated with death. Nevertheless, it is important not to convey meaning using colors due to colorblind people.

Regarding symbols, lets look at the example of body parts. When there is an image of a body part, one should take into account its meaning for the culture in the target market. For example, in arab countries the sole of the foot is considered to be on the dirtiest parts of the body, such as the left hand, as it is used for personal higiene.

On the other hand, the “thumbs up” gesture means that everything is OK in most countries, but in other countries such as Australia and Sicily it is insulting.

To illustrate this, please look at the following examples:

• The Schaeffler Group site is www.fag.com. In the US, for example, it has a pejorative meaning.
• A merger between General Electric Company with Plessey created the GTP brand, which in French sounds like J’ai pété (I’ve fart*d).
• The introduction of Honda Fitta in the Northern Europe countries, was after renamed to Honda Jazz. Fitta was slang for female genitalia.

Thank you for reading.

We are looking for collaborators for translation, localization and cultural consultancy, in the following language pairs:

Portuguese – Russian

Portuguese – Traditional and Simplified Chinese

Portuguese – Brazilian Portuguese

Portuguese – German

Portuguese – French

Portuguese – Italian

English – Hindi

We would like to hear from someone who has lived in the respective country for a few years, so that he/her can help with the localization of products/services/texts.

If you want to be a part of this please feel free to email us a CV and a short briefing about yourself to work (at) tradworks.com

We will try to answer all e-mails!

Thank you!

You may find a glitch or two, but we’ll have that all buffed out in a few days.

Tradworks is composed of young translators and a computer geek who have about 7 years of experience translating patents, training manuals, reports and most recently websites.

We are located at the beautiful city of Setúbal, said to have one of the best looking natural bays in the world! Go ahead and check this out on our main page.

We pride ourselves in our aversion to bureaucracy. It not only kills trees (remember Green is the way to go) but it also wastes your company’s valuable time. At Tradworks, you contact directly with who is handling your projects so that it all runs smoothly and efficiently.

For now we are aimming at the FR-PT, EN-PT, ES-PT and PT-EN language pairs. We are also focusing on patents, training and operating manuals, reports and website translation. In the future, our goal is to move into the medical translation area and increase our language pairs. One other aim of our group is social responsability. In the near future we want to either develop, contribute or sponsor social responsability programs.

Thank you for reading!