Over at Marcomments today, a post about transforming product/service features into customer benefits in your copywriting, a policy that I would say also applies to marketing translations. I would even go so far as to argue that, as a marketing translator, part of my job is to help customers make the shift from features to benefits, even — no, especially — when they have failed to do so in their original source-language copy.
An interesting case of this came across my desk recently. The product was a modular system of electrical equipment sold to building systems designers and installers. The feature was, in French, “faible nombre de références” (”limited range of part numbers” in English).
At first, I’ll have to admit that it was not immediately obvious to me why this was even a desirable thing. After some thought, and after discussion with the client, however, it became obvious that the benefit lurking within that feature was easy odering for the building systems professional using the product. And, to dig even deeper, (the “benefit of the benefit” as mentioned in the Marcomments post) was substantial time savings, reduced risk of ordering the wrong part number, and the ability to provide smoother, more professional service to their customers (by eliminating ordering errors and the delays that they can cause on an installation job).
Digging down until we got to the “benefit of the benefit” not only enabled us to produce an English version that was more benefits-oriented, it also alerted the customer to some feature/benefit issues with the original French version.
