Today, I got another Asian email forwarded from the SIAI’s registrar’s office. I have already told them I can’t understand Chinese, but this time it was a Korean email. I understand what it says, but I am going to tell the office to ignore the message.
Why?
Well… SIAI is an institution in Swiss, which offers services in English. Even if we are staffed for covering multiple languages, it does not mean that we should answer non-English random requests.
People see it in their own ways, not the way you want
And, based on my experience with people who put the cost of translation on us, they are unlikely going to be a good student. Most of them are not equipped with global mindset, highly self-centered, sometimes overly entitled, and have very low self-motivation on almost all matters. They think they are paying for luxury services, so the school should provide whatever the welfare they request. If their grade is bad, for example, it is the school’s fault, so we should make the exam easy or do the grading in favor of them, not for the school’s academic integrity. They should understand everything the school teaches, and if they can’t, it is the professors’ fault. They never blame themselves.
I might be biased, but I have seen such cases countlessly in Korea, China, and India. I can’t see what exactly has gone through in their mind, but one thing I have found so far in common is that people from the three countries often see global brands with translated services as the local brand with international branding.
So, a Chinese service page on SIAI makes them to think that SIAI is a Chinese-born service operating in Swiss. They expect we have full Chinese staff, so their Chinese emails will be answered in Chinese.
Exactly the same scenario frequently happens to Koreans as well.
Full site translation is a luxury for fully global service
If we were a global service with global offices, that may work. For that, we should have Shanghai, Seoul, and Mumbai offices to answer local requests.
Do we have SIAI China, SIAI Korea, and SIAI India? Nope. We barely have a few webpages for international audiences. No more than that.
Thanks to translators, we can easily translate the emails and answer back with some clarity of understanding. But, for SIAI student admissions, I doubt that’s the right marketing strategy. If we were a diploma mill, then it may make sense to answer in all languages. Every new student is a sales score. But we are not a diploma mill. We only want highly dedicated, motivated, and global-minded students with basic understanding of social code.
See one, then you’ve seen them all
There is a Chinese idiom, 以一知万, meaning if you see 1, you can understand 10,000. Because that exposed single indicator does represent 10,000 hidden factors.
The fact that they see a little translation services as a sign of full regional support tells a lot about them. And, the fact that there are a lot of them in China, Korea, and India tells more than just that. Full site translation indeed can create whole different level of un-intended consequences that you probably do not want your brand to be exposed to such risky and uncontrolled cases.
I once had a Korean guy claming that SIAI is another Swiss university’s child brand. That Swiss university took a legal action against us. We only figured out what happened after the ungrounded rumor had become widely popular. SIAI almost lost a school license for that. I was only one nail away from accusing the Korean guy, but instead, removed the entire Korean translation.
Full site translation is a bad business strategy
This winter, the institution is in the process of full site renewal. I told them that we should drop regional subdomain services and further minimize offering translation services. Offering non-English services make a large portion of Asian people think that we are Chinese, Korean, and Indian companies, which will only downgrade our reputation in those countries without much upside. We would better stay aloof from the regional markets, especially from those people who may create false rumors from their imagination.
We can play a retaliation game, like “Disservice should be answered with disservice”. But, I think it is far better to correctify the wrong signal and give no room for mis-understanding. We offer some translation, but that’s just machine translator, not a full regional opeation. Or, like I have done before with SIAI’s Korean translated websites, we just remove them completely.
The design and domain updates will take a month or two, and after that, I really don’t want the Swiss registrar to be bothered by Asian emails. (and don’t like to find my inbox with the forwarded Asian emails.)