Colorful monsters
It is wise to consider the fact that with one small mistake, one wrongly chosen word, you can be out of the picture immediately. In the presentations that I regularly give to companies about effective communication, I like to give an example from a children's book. The Spanish writer Anna Llenas has created a beautiful pop-up book in which she explains emotions using colorful monsters. A few years ago I read that book to my youngest son. We enjoyed every page. Until, in the Dutch translation of the book, we came across a word that was simply wrongly chosen.
Don't be insignificant
In the explanation of the emotion fear there is the sentence: 'When you are afraid, you feel small and insignificant'. My son and I looked at each other in surprise after reading that word, we both felt that it was not right. Insignificant. Not only a word that many a reader's eye stumbles over, but especially a word that does not exist in the guatemala whatsapp number vocabulary (sorry, vocabulary) of children. It is literally an insignificant word for children. Why did the translator not simply choose 'unimportant' here?
colorful monsters
My son and I have finished the book and we are still fans. But still: the moment we both frowned and were pulled out of the story, stayed with us. Such a moment makes you as a target group doubt whether you are the target group at all. And often that is the beginning of the end: dropping out is lurking there. Tip 3: weigh every word.
Word choice comes first
People who are involved in communication usually pay too little attention to word choice. Jargon and difficult terms still manage to infiltrate texts far too often. Not to mention the worst words of all: big words. These words are often used by marketers to turn something ordinary into something unique or great. Almost every marketing or communication manual now emphasizes that you should not spout too much of this kind of blah-blah, but apparently marketing people still find it very difficult to resist this urge.