Why Drive-Thrus Failed in China (And Other Insane Localization Stories)

Sean Weisbrot: Welcome back to another episode of the We Live To Build podcast. I'm here today with David Garcia Gonzalez is the co-founder and CEO of Go Localize a firm which specializes in translation and localization. We're similar in that we've lived and traveled all over the world. David was born in Spain, immigrated to the uk, and lived there for many years. And more recently he's been living in the us. We talked about how to do translation and localization, right? What happens when you fail to care about the details? And I share some funny stories about China in this regard. This was a fun episode and while I wish you could have heard the entire hour, I cut out 40 minutes, so it was more on point and concise.

Sean Weisbrot: If you want to hear the full episode in the future, send me an email to We Live to build@gmail.com and let me know. If I get enough feedback, I'll start to cut less out of each episode so you can hear more of the full conversation. Thanks again for sticking with me through 79 episodes. Here's to another 79.

Sean Weisbrot: Tell everyone a little bit about yourself and how you got into this kind of business.

David: So my name is David Garcia Gonzalez. I was. Born in Northern Spain and I lived there until I was 16 years old. Uh, then I decided to go and study in the uk, finished my high school, did a university there, did a master's in legal translation, which I hated it.

David: It was the worst thing that ever happened to me. After that, I just kind of got more into translation and localization. And then a couple of years later I did another in Are. For whoever doesn't really know what localization means, it's adapting the content from one language to another, but also from one market to another.

David: So let's say translating the content from English into Spanish, that's localization, but it's also adapting it. So if there's any nuances or anything that is local to the language or to the pop culture or whatever that might be, when you translate it into Spanish, you adapt it. You use SPAN as examples from TV or from radio, from whatever that might be.

David: So it's not just a word, word translation, but adaptation of the whole thing. And also a localization could also be within the same language. So it could be a TV show from the uk and that gets localized into, into the us. So there's certain things that probably wouldn't work out because people don't really know those people or those famous people.

David: So it gets all adapted in, into the US market. That's what localization is.

Sean Weisbrot: One of the things I'm curious to know is when a client comes to you and talks about like, I need you to do this project for me, how do you plan for success with a client?

David: Most clients localize the content for many different languages.They don't really tend to know all of the languages, so most important question that we need to ask them, who is your target market? And you obviously know a, a lot about China and that is, uh, the perfect example. If someone says, can you localize something for Hong Kong? It's gonna be very different than if you were based in Taiwan or if you were based in Beijing.

David: I think asking the right questions will hopefully get the client to, if they don't know it, ask someone who's gonna be listening to this? Who's gonna be the market? Is it gonna be colloquial? Is asking those kind of questions. Gonna get a lot closer to the, don't wanna say the perfect product, but you're gonna be a lot closer to a product that is gonna be to the quality and expectation of the end.

Sean Weisbrot: So let's assume I'm a company and I want to do localization. Let's say I, I wanna do it in-house. How do I take the next step, right? Once I figure out the target audience and whether it's gonna be colloquial or, or street language, like how, once I figure those things out, what's the next thing I should be thinking of?

David: Let's say you want to localize an e-learning course from English us. To mainland China. So the first question will be, who's your target market? The target market on this case will be mainland China. Those pick a Mandarin. And I think the second and third question that we will be asking as a company will be, who's just gonna be your target market?

David: Is it gonna be a student, a professional? Are you gonna be training them? Does this needs to be formal? How do you want to communicate? With them. You know, American companies tend to be quite relaxed and casual with their approach. Maybe the Chinese counterpart wants to go for a more formal or just the way they do things.

David: So I think asking who's, who's the, who's the person who's gonna be listening to that, what is the purpose of the recording? Obviously with a e-learning course, that's two steps. So first, we'll have to translate and localize the written content once that content has been translated and localized. What we tend to do as a company is we'll send it to the client for them to approve.

David: Normally what they'll do is they'll send it to whoever they've got in their office in China and they'll kind of approve it, that sometimes they might change a few words here and there for their internal terminology that they use. And then once that's done, we will work with the client to pick a voice of a talent that they will like to represent as their company, as their voice.

David: Uh, and after that, basically we invite the, the clients to be present on any recorded session that we do. 10 to 15 into the session to make sure that the pace, pace, the voice sounds just.

Sean Weisbrot: I was laughing while you said that, although my, my microphone was muted so nobody could see it or hear it because I think localization is actually a lot more than just, I wanna do this for, for this certain group in this certain country. Because you said something that was extremely relevant to literally today where the Chinese government has embarked on a crusade to destroy for-profit education.

Sean Weisbrot: And the reason they're doing it is because they've also recently admitted to feed in the one child policy where they realize that they don't have enough young people to take care of the elderly in terms of paying into the social security system. So in order to incentivize new families to have more than one child in this generation, they have to do everything in their power to get the cost of raising a child down. Otherwise, it becomes untenable for the average family to. To have more than one kid. One of the things that families do with one kid is they put all of their money into raising that kid, so they put a ton of money into their education in order to give these kids an edge over the other kids, because they are all seriously competing with each other for work.

Sean Weisbrot: They all need an edge. What do people do? They take them to these piano lessons and these English lessons and all of the different lessons that they could possibly push the kid into to give them an edge. And the Chinese government is now destroying for-profit education, making it all nonprofit. So the idea of localizing an e-learning course into China right now is actually probably the worst thing you could think of doing as a company.

David: It just really depends. I mean, we're based in London, so we tend to work with a lot of companies that they have. These e-learning courses that they're going to use in all of their offices. So sometimes it's just a compliance thing or they just have to have it for HR purposes or whatever that might be.

David: So sometimes they might not be too fussy on how they are as long as they are there because they needed them for legal reasons. Really. Uh, if you're looking at something, um. Localizing the content or something, let's say a film or something that is, it's more personal and it's gonna have a different style, then that's something a bit more instructional.

David: There's gonna be a lot of ity, how you localize it and how you translate it, and especially how you adapt it. Uh, there's a lot of American films from, from the nineties, for instance. That's when I was a teenager. I remember when I saw them in Spain, the terms were like, oh, well that doesn't make any sense.

David: I mean, that's, they lost a joke because when now I go back and listen to the filming in English, I just realized that we would've never understood that kind of pop culture and all of those terms and all of those things that they were drinking or eating or we didn't have those things. So there was either an adaptation that was within the localization, there were, there was not equivalent and such.

Sean Weisbrot: Yeah, I'm used to watching Japanese animation and I almost across the board, refuse to listen to the English dubs. I'd rather hear the Japanese 'cause I like it. It's a beautiful sounding language, but inevitably the subtitles have problems. I used to actually work on a fan subbing group many years ago for anime, like 15, no, like 20 years ago.

Sean Weisbrot: We would have someone who knew the language translate it into English, and then I would go through and edit it for clarity. Like I would watch the episode and I would have the subtitles and I would go, nah, no. And I would fix everything. And then I would send it on to someone else who would like time it and then it would be encoded and all of that.

Sean Weisbrot: So I'm aware of how if you don't understand the point that's trying to be made, it's very easy to screw it up.

David: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, obviously you need to understand. Down with the what, the English or what the original says. Sometimes it's very, very difficult for someone to be bilingual in both languages.

David: 'cause even if I'm very good at English, I was born and brought up in Spain. So all of my cultural references are gonna be mainly based on what I've learned when I was a child as I was growing up. Let's say a film like Clueless, I'm sure everyone's seen that film from the nineties. References about high school and, and Mentos and all of those things that are very, very specific to a language.

David: There is no way to be able to properly transfer them into a different language or market just because maybe those products or those cultural things don't really translate because we don't have those products, because we don't use something similar. It's more about the subjectivity of the person, the translator or the subtitle, to try to come out with an alternative that actually fits within the same time and space and is got the same kind of punch.

David: Which, you know, if you don't really understand the English, then it doesn't really matter. You just judge it on whatever you've got in front of you and hope for the best, really, and hope that it actually works. Many times it doesn't work so many times you.

Sean Weisbrot: So, having lived in China, I noticed a lot of Western brands trying to get into China, and most of them failed miserably, having probably spent tens of millions of dollars in their effort to do so. There's several companies that have succeeded in China. One of them is Burger King, one of them is McDonald's.

Sean Weisbrot: One of them is KFC, one of them is Starbucks. Those are by far the most successful brands. From the west. Part of localization is also giving yourself a local name. 'cause you can't call yourself Burger King. You have to use the words that they can say in Chinese, it's Hong Huang, which literally translates to Hamburger King, but the other ones don't do as good of a job.

David: It's funny that you mentioned about very mainstream brands like Starbucks or Burger King or McDonald's. 'cause to me those are almost kind of. International brands, you see the little m whether you're in China or South America or whatever you are, and you already instantly recognize who they're, because they're totally international.

David: I mean, I remember an example with American Airlines from the eighties and they were translating and localizing, uh, one of their campaigns from the us. When they were starting to fly to Mexico more often, they were coming up with a new business sets. There was very luxurious. They were all made with leather, and the way they translated into Spanish is, which in English was flying leather, but Bodo cudos means naked. So they basically translated in.

David: Flying naked. So it was obviously a bit of an issue once they were starting using it in Mexico because everybody thought, well, I don't really wanna fly naked on this plane because it's not quite what I was hoping for. Obviously they were looking for something luxurious and something really good to entice people to fly more often, I'd be more comfortable, but obviously there was a bit of an issue with, uh, checking the translation, the localization, and.

Sean Weisbrot: Thank you for sharing that. I was hoping that you would share these kinds of things. Do you have any others?

David: well there was another one from China for the brand Coca-Cola. I think it was in the sixties or seventies. They translated the brand name to Chinese and they translated it Coca-Cola as in it will revive the debt people from the Toms or something like that.

David: It was kind of crazy and at that time what happened is that people didn't want to drink Coca-Cola because of that slogan translated popular in China.

Sean Weisbrot: They call themselves in Chinese Coca-Cola, they've done a translation that is literally the sound of Coca-Cola in the characters that represent those same sounds in Chinese.

Sean Weisbrot: So sometimes you'll actually do that or you'll do like, uh, burger King, where it's a little translation of like, king is Wong and Hamburger is Hamburg. The Burger.

David: King makes a little bit more sense because they get a concept of what they're trying to sell. The king of the burgers.

Sean Weisbrot: Exactly. So in that regard it makes sense. But hamburgers are also something that they, that the Chinese don't really get. They get McDonald's, but I don't know if they default to a beef burger when they go there. I know KFC kills it. They do. Yum. Brands does amazingly well in China because Chinese love to eat chicken. They love chicken wings. They don't really eat breasts so much. They mostly just really love chicken wings and chicken.

David: Oh, wow.

Sean Weisbrot: KFC doesn't really do the feet thing, but you can get feet at like any sort of traditional Chinese restaurant. I remember when Obama was president, he did a deal with, with the Chinese government, where I think he just kind of gave the Chinese government $2 billion worth of chicken feet because it's something that in America, we throw away.

Sean Weisbrot: It's a byproduct right there. You can't use it. Like Americans aren't gonna eat chicken feed. It's just. It's disgusting for us. We want the core, the meat. Now I'm not a meat eater, but Americans in general, like they'll eat the chicken breast. The, they'll weighing the thigh, they'll eat the core parts that actually have this meat inside.

Sean Weisbrot: But the Chinese, they just love to sit there and chew on chicken feet, all the power to 'em. And, and so Obama did a, a trade deal with the government where he is like, yeah, here's $2 billion with the chicken feet. We were gonna just throw it. Not like we're gonna throw it away, but like, eh, this is a gift to you guys.

Sean Weisbrot: Here's $2 billion of chicken. And they're like, oh wow, thanks. But like $2 billion of chicken feet doesn't do the whole country justice in a year. Like you need maybe $10 billion, maybe more of chicken feet to satisfy the demand. I know because in a former life I was actually involved in international trade and I was purchasing chicken feet for China from Brazil, and sometimes I would get orders of like millions of kilos a month.

Sean Weisbrot: I'm talking 5,000 containers a month. From Brazil to China and they were doing like five or 6,000 containers a month, I think the whole country. Wow.

David: Well, I mean, I think when it comes to obviously localization, if we focus on this example that you just mentioned about the Chinese and like in chicken weeks.

David: Chicken fit. It's when you adapt whatever product, then you need to think about what's gonna work in the end market, in this case in China. So if they don't need chicken breast, then whoever's gonna do a campaign will have to think, okay, what do they eat? How can we target, how can we localize the McDonald's brand so that it works in China?

David: I don't know if they do this in the US, but I know people in Spain drink lots of beer. So in McDonald's you can actually get beers, not the fountain beers like you do here with the refills, but you can get that. And if you go to Enos Aires, you can get the desserts that instead of having chocolate difficult, so the letter, because it's something local that people like it.

David: So they have adapted their own individual brands and products. Obviously get more customers and to feel that they're more recognized and that they actually, you know, wanna do something nice for them really, and for them people to appreciate the brand really. So they, they did twist that with the foods and with the products, right?

Sean Weisbrot: There was something in China that I really liked, which was. They would do these egg tarts at McDonald's. It's like 80 cents or 70 cents for an egg tart and it's got a little bit of sugar in the egg. It's just really nicely done, and they've got like these pineapple pies or you get a taro flavor, which is like kind of a, like a sweet potato, like this purple sweet potato.

Sean Weisbrot: All of these brands do their own sorts of localization with the food menus. Like if you go to KFC in China. It's a sit down experience. It's a middle class experience in America. It's kind of like a lower class experience. Like, so what's what's amazing is these brands want to be seen as for sophisticated people in Asia.

Sean Weisbrot: And so I remember hearing about people wanting to go to these restaurants, like on dates. You're like, oh, where are you going for your first date? Oh, we're gonna go to, we're gonna go to McDonald's.

David: It's expensive. You do that in the would be, and that.

Sean Weisbrot: These brands have localized in a way that they are actually fundamentally a different experience as a company in relation to that.

David: If you think about it, you know, in the US people trick through like something very casual, like there's a lot of fast food, so you can even get a drive through and just get your burger or get your Starbucks or whatever that might be.

David: But I think for instance, in Spain, people don't actually. Eat while they're driving. I think food in Southern Europe countries especially, it's, it's, it's more of a sacred thing. So you take your break, you get your food, you sit down, you have one or two courses, you have the dessert. It's more like a ritual almost.

David: And I think maybe the way they stand it in China is kind of similar to that, where people do take that break, they sit down and they eat their meal rather than eat as you go, like. What we do in the uk, you just eat on the tube. Well, maybe, you know, in China they, they've gone for an approach that works to get more customers.

David: The door. If they have maybe like a drive through or maybe they tested it, who knows? They've realized that people wanna do that in the car.

Sean Weisbrot: So they actually, they did have their first test of a drive-through in China, probably a decade ago. What they found was people were getting the food through the drive-through in their car, parking in the parking lot.

Sean Weisbrot: I. And then going inside to eat it, or they would walk through the drive-through as a culture. They had no concept of what a drive-through was.

David: That kind of defeats the purpose, if you think about it. 'cause to me, in the US you get your car, you got your Starbucks, or you get your burger, and then something that as you get to work or if you're in a hurry, then you just can't eat it quickly, whatever you are.

David: And to me, if you have a drive-through and then you stop to eat it, it kind of like, well, I might as well just eat it inside, if you know what I mean. Right.

Sean Weisbrot: The cultural thing here that they probably weren't thinking about is that most people in China live in really large cities of 10 million or more, where there's a really fantastic public infrastructure.

Sean Weisbrot: And so the average person doesn't own a car. They can't afford a car, so they either walk everywhere to public transport. Or they'll take like a taxi. So the point of a drive-through is kind of useless because nobody can afford cars, doesn't

David: travel by car, they travel with public transport. So yeah, it defeat the purpose of an drive-through if you don't have a car.

David: So I guess they tested it and then realized that, well, people are not driving, so it doesn't make any sense. We must as well just cut that off and just have the restaurants where people come in and order the food.

Sean Weisbrot: No, they, they kept it. They kept doing it. The average American driver is about 16 when they start driving.

Sean Weisbrot: The average Chinese driver is about 32 to 35 when they start driving. Now, they might have experience with scooters as teenagers, but scooters and cars are totally different things. I love to see these kind of nuance differences in, uh, cultures.

David: If you think about this, this examples that we're talking about now.

David: You have to really know a lot about that culture and probably you need to live in that country to know that those things don't work. Because if you are a translator who knows a lot about who are US native, but you move to China, you might know all of those things, but you might not know how to come up with an equivalent or a localized version.

David: It takes a bit of trial and error. You were mentioning that they were pushing for the drive-throughs, even though the people, the people didn't have cars. Obviously as a translator who lives in the US has never been to China, but maybe studied Chinese for many, many years, they wouldn't be able to come up with something like that.

David: And it just takes a a lot of, for a company, obviously, if they wanna push it and they want to spend money trying it, then they do that and they realize it doesn't work. That was a perfect example of about localization. Because it wasn't never gonna go anywhere, but I guess they had to try it. In this example it's, especially from the movies from the fifties and the sixties, like Greece, when they were gonna the car and they were watching those films.

David: I think sometimes people kind of like those examples and they want to push those things that people see in films to see if that takes on. But if it doesn't, it doesn't, and I think you just gotta move forward. An example of that kind of localization is something doesn't work. You learn from that lesson and then you, you know that that doesn't work and you adapt it to whatever content that you're pushing through Really.

Sean Weisbrot: It's been interesting so far. We've talked about a lot of random things. It's really easy to do well, and it's really easy to screw up depending on who you are, how you look at it, how humble you're willing to be, and who you hire to help you. You are also talking about someone who may have studied Chinese but never actually spent time there.

Sean Weisbrot: On the flip side, I've also encountered people who were natives of that country, who grew up in that country, who also could speak another. Language like English, who were working with companies on their localization and failed to comprehend the uniqueness of what was being offered and therefore how to make it understandable to the people because it was something so foreign to them that they just had no concept of how to make it make sense.

Sean Weisbrot: So how do you manage that?

David: That's a really good question, and I think if you don't really know what something is or how something works or what people do with that concept, that idea, that product, that service, the best thing you can do as an individual or if you are willing to hire a company to help you with that is just have someone doing a lot of market research asking the right question, trying to understand exactly.

David: How people use that, how people interact with that. What does it do? What's all about it really? And the more you get to understand that concept, even if it's foreign, it might not be that you can, you know, fully come up with a word that represents that, but you can maybe have a little explanation of. What that does.

David: But initially to be able to kind of transfer something correctly with the same kind of meaning and nuances, the only thing you can do is just try to really, really understand how it works, what it does, how are people interacting with that idea, that concept.

Sean Weisbrot: So is there anything that we didn't talk about that you wanted to mention real fast before we close out this episode?

David: I've published a book called Child Bite in Tourism and Changing Your Arm, and it's got a little sub phrase called How I Made It Big in Britain. Obviously that's a bit tongue in cheek. I didn't make it big in Britain, but I made it big for myself, but not in terms of like Donald Trump, but it's a book that I wrote because I wanted to tell my story.

David: I, my experiences, it's very much related to localization. I moved to the UK even though I knew a little bit of English. Mine was an AP to scratch to do many things, and when you learn the language, you almost kind learn it as. Spoke English with everything's grammatical and correct, and when you get exposed to the country, everything changes.

David: Nobody really speaks like that, so you had to adapt. So I wrote that book almost to help people that were moving from one country to another, that they had to learn a new language. And all of those lessons learned were not really learned, but they were, fuck, pardon my French, you might have to that. All of those things.

David: Maybe if I would've known better, I would've done differently. But those are the things that met you, who you are and you won't make them again.