Found in Translation

Multilingual Is the New Black
Speaking of the importance of image, there’s one group of translators that
have their fingers on the pulse of emerging trends. Style guru Tim Gunn raves
about their work. Popular fashion brands such as Coach, Juicy Couture, and
Michael Kors rely on them too. So do the brands that you see on display every
day at your local shopping mall, like Oakley, Fossil, Estée Lauder, and Reebok.
You’ll find their influence at your local Target, Kohl’s, and Macy’s and in
catalogs like Land’s End and Victoria’s Secret. Those trends you see appearing
in the mainstream this month? They knew about these fads more than a year
ago. You might even say that they fuel the fashion industry.
“They” are the translators who work at Stylesight, a trend forecasting
company that provides coverage not just of fashion, but of style and design for
clothing, accessories, and interiors. The company reviews trends and creates
forecasts not just based on what they see on the runway, but by what they find
happening in local markets. Trends travel the globe, and these translators
enable that information to be harvested and understood locally.
Stylesight views its trend reporting service as “global connective
knowledge” that is produced by hundreds of editors and correspondents
working all over the world. These individuals generate trend images and
content every minute of each day. To share the information with its clients
across the globe, the company translates it into five languages.
The information created by the Stylesight network includes not only its
website but newsletters that go out daily, weekly, and monthly. And perhaps
surprising, one of the biggest areas of content that requires translation is its
image library, which contains nearly eight million images. Why do images
need translation? Well, remember, a picture is worth a thousand words. Each
image is tagged with keywords—maybe not a thousand of them, but certainly
enough to help visitors easily find them and understand the details of what is
conveyed within a given picture.
Keyword translation might sound simple, but it’s actually quite complex.
Sometimes, a single word can be more difficult to translate because it doesn’t

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benefit from the context of the rest of a sentence. Each keyword has to be
defined carefully, taking into account its relationship with other cultures and
languages. Think about how you would try to explain terms like grunge or
utility chic to a ninety-year-old, and you’ll get the idea. Converting phrases
such as bomber-cape hybrid, plasticized lace, quilted calico, and peekaboo tulle
into another language can be a daunting task, but it keeps the fashion industry
churning.
Stylesight’s translation department is based in New York, where they have
in-house talent for Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and Turkish. The team
consists not only of translation managers and language editors but graphic
designers who speak multiple languages. Again, where image matters, images
matter. The designers not only have to lay out text in other languages but pick
fonts that will work for those languages, add line breaks, and so on.
“This is not a service that any external translation agency would be able to
provide,” explains Francis Wong, senior vice president and creative director at
Stylesight. “It requires a deep understanding of the knowledge our team has
built over many years.”
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The translation team interacts constantly with the
original writers and creative directors, even providing feedback and ideas that
end up being incorporated into the original reports before publication.
Not every term gets translated. Sometimes, a given descriptor is left in-
language, or in some cases, a bit more explanation is required. “Often, after
translation, a sentence can get much longer or much shorter,” Wong points out.
“Spanish is often double the length when compared to the same sentence in
Chinese.” With such meaning-packed terms as mannish minimalism, scuba-
inspired jeggings, raffia-embellished pinafores, and underwear as outerwear,
it’s no wonder Stylesight requires professional translators to make sense of
them and convert them into other languages.