C+R’s Brenda Hurley, Senior Vice President, and Juan Ruiz, Research Director will be speaking at the Millennial Mega Mashup Conference on May 8th at the Perry South Beach Hotel (formerly the Gansevoort Miami).
In their session “Millennial Parents: A Segmentation of Different Parenting Styles,” Juan and Brenda will discuss the ways in which Millennial parents view the job of raising today’s children. Using data from our annual YouthBeat® study and online community, ParentSpeak.com, they will look at:
- How this cohort crafts its own rules, its own notions of the “rights” of parents, and its own resources for helping them navigate through circumstances that look very different from those of the generation before them
- How values and rules differ between moms and dads within this segment
- How the Hispanic Millennial parent defines his or her role
- How parenting styles impact shopping and consumption habits, and its marketing implications
To register for the conference and receive 25% off your registration, use our discount code MASHUP12CR on the Millennial Mega Mashup site.
Hispanic Market Research – Don’t Get Lost in Translation
September 14th, 2011
By Juan Ruiz, Senior Research Analyst
Caution! What you said, what you meant to say, and what the other understood may not always be the same thing…
At C+R Research, we have a diverse group. Last week, it was the birthday of a Polish colleague. A few emails started going back and forth to see where we would take him for lunch. Then, one of our Hispanic colleagues sent an email that read “Szczęśliwy dzień urodzenia.” Clever as she is, she had used an online site to translate “Happy Birthday” to Polish. That email triggered a chain of emails – all in Polish, although no one other than the birthday boy spoke Polish. Later he mentioned that many messages sounded funny because computer translations can be excessively literal.
This made me think about the challenges we face every day translating questionnaires. Our Hispanic division, LatinoEyes® specializes in the U.S. Hispanic market where most of our studies require conducting fieldwork in the respondent’s language of choice (English or Spanish). Paying special attention to our translations is crucial. If respondents answering questions in English understand the questions differently than the respondents answering in Spanish, our data and our findings will suffer.
Now, making sure that nothing is lost in translation is not an easy task. There are words that have different meanings in different Spanish-speaking countries, and even some expressions can vary significantly by length in different dialects. All of this adds complexity to the translation process.
How do we do it at LatinoEyes®? Through lots of communication! It is key that the person responsible for the translation is on the same page with the person who wrote the English version. The translator needs to be a speaker of the target dialect. We debate; we come to consensus. We have Spanish speakers from different countries of origin, and they have different levels of acculturation. They all share their point of view when needed.
How are you doing it?
