It’s no surprise that the Spoony shoulder bag didn’t catch on, and although this flagrant example of failed brand piracy is amusing, it’s also a shining example of why accuracy matters. The above picture was taken in Mainland China, where Spoony probably passes for the bona fide article more often than not. But even in its native environs, Spoony is an obvious gaffe to any literate English speaker.Manufacturers of cheap, counterfeit merchandise don’t typically invest in professional language translators and the results speak for themselves.

Without accurate language translation, your company could be at risk of committing its own spoonyisms.

One has to assume that the charlatans running the operation that created this garish yellow hilarity could not read English well enough to note the transposition of two letters that leaps out at us so obviously. If you’re equally limited in your Chinese reading skills, your translated documents could be complete butcheries of that venerable language. But how would you know?

It’s not enough for your text to look convincingly foreign. Any trickster can take your text and run it through an online translator to turn out something you can’t read let alone verify the accuracy of. That places you in the precarious position of trusting your language translation service and trust, in a cut-throat business environment, is a hard commodity to come by.

Your best bet for ensuring accurate language translation is to begin with trained, qualified, certified professionals. Reputable language translation companies are proud of their credentials and will provide them on demand. Your language translation provider should be a member of recognized associations and the firm’s translators should be certified in their identified languages and specialty industries. Legal translators have different specialized vocabularies than do medical, industrial, technical, and academic translators. In all of those cases, certification is a critical distinction between qualified professionals and persuasive hacks.

Accurate language translation is critical to effective international business, ensuring clarity of communication and avoidance of error. It also helps you avoid embarrassment. Nobody wants their company to seem cheap, and nothing says cheap like “Spoony.”

If you’re looking for accurate language translation, you should demand credentials. Ask for proof of membership in reputable language associations. Ask for certifications and ask for internal policies and procedures that ensure accuracy and quality. All those things come at a price, but it’s a price well worth paying. If you’re stepping into the international world, you want to make a good first impression and embarrassing mis-translations make bad impressions.