By Juan Tornoe
Earlier today I received an email from a person who was kind enough to give as a gift his old Weber grill to his Latino gardener (talk about stereotypes!). It went something along these lines:
I gave my charcoal Weber to my gardener, who speaks and reads primarily Spanish. Can you lead me to a website where I can download basic grilling instructions in Spanish?
Hey, how difficult can it be to use a grill??? (This coming from a guy whose specialty in the kitchen is a mean bowl of cereal!)
Well, being aware that Weber has been reaching out to Hispanics for a while now, my initial course of action was to go straight to their website:
There in front of me, on the top right hand corner (exactly where I would advice for it to be) was the “En Español” hyperlink; unnoticeable enough for my American friend to see it, but there nonetheless. The question that immediately came to mind was, “Should it be this way, OR should the ‘We Also Cater to Spanish Speakers’ sign be more in your face?
First of all, the “En Español” phrase, in my opinion, is overused, boring, and does not engage the customer in meaningful way. I would go for something along the lines of “En Tu Idioma” (In Your Language). If you are going to include the hyperlink in Spanish, might as well utilize it in a way that connects in a more emotional way that a traffic sign. This phrase engages the customers' attention, since it is immediately talking to THEM in THEIR language about something that is very likely they are asking themselves once they arrive to the company’s website: “Is this site in a language I can understand or am more comfortable with?"
Secondly, they hyperlink itself should be more attractive to the eye. Please no piñatas, sombreros, donkeys, mustaches, mariachis or any other indication of a “Fiesta!” Utilize your site’s already instituted color palette and style and make that link stand out. It is important enough that you do. Consider that you have already invested the time, money, and effort into developing some (or all) of your site’s content in Spanish; why are would you want to hide it from your potential customers who will appreciated so much in so many ways?
Independently if you are a small business or a multimillion-dollar corporation, please pretty please make sure to invest the extra dollars in having the translation done by a professional and make sure that someone else as professional as the first person edits the Spanish content. In my Weber grill “expedition” I was extremely glad to find a more than decent amount of Spanish Content, but was somewhat dismayed by the fact that on the Spanish-language home page I found several grammatical and orthographical errors.
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