Financial/MarCom
The translation of technical documentation is fairly straightforward. Not so, however, when it comes to marketing and financial material. In the latter, special consideration has to be paid to institutional and product differences between the country of the source language and the country of the target language(s). For the former, translators often have to get creative: images that work in one language may not work at all in another, so a client's message may have to be couched in terms that are quite different from the original.
A case in point is the project we undertook for a manufacturer of integrated circuits that was planning to change the company name in advance of an expansion into overseas markets. They didn't want to make the same mistake that major American automobile manufacturer had made in Latin America with a certain compact car whose name could be translated as “doesn't run” in Spanish. The client gave us three alternatives and we had translators from the target countries evaluate them for odd or negative connotations. The results—some of them quite humorous indeed (one name had a whiff of “stinky” in French)—were compiled and presented to the client so they could make an informed decision.