Monolingual vs multilingual: The key to communications that will resonate with Australians today
Rune Pedersen, head of localisation at Think HQ CultureVerse, writes that our country is multilingual, yet one language still dominates every facet of how we conceive and distribute campaigns.
Australians speak hundreds of languages, and if we count dialects, it is easily in the thousands. Our country is multilingual, yet one language still dominates every facet of how we conceive and distribute campaigns.
We imagine our ideas in English, draft our designs with English in mind, and write our copy for English readers. This is known as a monolingual mindset, and it’s stopping your campaigns from connecting with every target audience.
How can we break free from the tunnel vision of one language? Well, by broadening our worldview and understanding the nuances between languages for Australian audiences.
If that feels like a huge and daunting task, bear with me. I get it. Tell any team to add more audiences to the brief and you’re likely to hear something like “you can’t speak to everyone.”
But if any part of your audience speaks a language other than English, and in Australia they almost certainly do, your concept must be flexible enough to become multilingual. It’s rarely effective when you retrofit a pre-packaged campaign for a new audience by putting out a word-for-word language translation. To fully resonate, you need to consider the cultural context of your campaign before the first seeds of an idea have sprouted.
Heading up the localisation team at Think HQ CultureVerse means I’ve been a long term advocate for better transcreation processes in the advertising industry. For bringing translators and creatives together to find common ground from the outset.
What is often overlooked is that taking the first steps toward this new mindset can be as simple as asking the right questions.
Does that phrase mean the same thing to someone who wasn’t born in Australia? Does this concept stir the same emotions for those with different experiences to mine?
A monolingual mindset assumes all communication happens through only one language at a time. A multilingual mindset approaches concepts with the understanding that not everyone will interpret a language, reference, or word in the same way.
Onboarding these viewpoints might eventually see our industry re-design the entire creative approach. But for now, you don’t have to start big. Dip your toes in by simply being curious and open to the different meanings of phrases used around you every day.
This is the notion that underpins a project that Think HQ has produced for SBS Audio, The Idiom: a podcast that I have the great pleasure of hosting, which explores weird and wonderful idioms from Australia and around the world.
Everyday language is peppered with phrases that don’t always mean what they say or say what they mean. From ‘raining cats and dogs’ to ‘beating around the bush’, idioms add colour that give our languages life. They stay with us through thick and thin, and they get passed down through generations like a chip off the old block. See what I did there?
Akin to modern copywriting, idioms are based on cultural phenomena and wordplay. You can find them in every language around the world, but not every person will understand their meaning when translated.
To me, idioms represent more than a bunch of quirky phrases we use to express ourselves. They paint a picture of the multilingual mindset, proving that if you want to talk to anyone, you need to understand their culture to get communication right.
When I first moved to Australia, I found myself in a rather awkward encounter with a local. He greeted me by saying “How ya going?”, so I leaned in, ready to offer a lengthy and heartfelt response to describe my genuine state of being in that exact moment.
Naturally, the stranger simply meant to say hello, and as a new migrant from Denmark my first thought was to answer in a very personal sense (as we would back home). I didn’t yet understand the nuance of the meaning behind the question, and so our conversation became lost in the void of translation.
In a poetic turn of events, I now get to spend my days ensuring communications campaigns don’t get lost in translation. And when Think HQ was commissioned to produce The Idiom for SBS Audio, and I stepped in to host the podcast, we realised the episodes would take us on a similar journey of learning.
For my part, I’ve loved hosting The Idiom because the way it lets listeners join the exploration, in the most quirky and delightful ways. But while the podcast is a whole lot of fun, there remains an important message underlining the sounds of donkeys and raindrops. Cultural experiences shape our language, and Australians don’t communicate through the lens of an exclusively English-speaking culture.
Rune Pedersen is head of localisation at Think HQ CultureVerse.
Listen to The Idiom on SBS Audio
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Nathan Jolly is the Deputy Editor of Mumbrella. He joined the team in July, 2023.
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Rune Pedersen
Think HQ CultureVerse
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