Bilingual Packaging is Interesting
Print materials are a great place to look for web design inspiration. (I’m particularly fond of table of contents pages in magazines — lots of ideas for navigation motifs.)
The sort of print that appears on packaging has an additional problem: limited real estate.
Which is what makes bilingual packaging doubly interesting. Bilingual designers have to find ways to balance more than one language, as well as deal with space restrictions. A post on
bilingual packaging got me thinking about this again.
I’ve started poking around in results like these looking for interesting examples. While the author of the link above is concentrating on Welsh/English bilingual packages, I’ll be looking for links to any language pair. Pointers welcome.
11 comments.
Technorati tags: bilingual, packaging, translation
French/Dutch in Belgian products.
You get to see a lot of Czech/Slovak bilingual packaging in the Czech Republic and Slovakia. Many everyday products there are marketed in both countries and they come packaged bilingually. The bilingualism is often extremely strict, every single piece of text is in both languages, all the way from the product name down to the nutritional info. Strictly speaking this is unnecessary because the languages are mutually understandable but I guess it’s probably a legal requirement.
As you may know, Czech and Slovak are very similar. So when you place Czech and Slovak text next to each other, the differences are often minimal, sometimes it’s just a difference of one letter or an accent, so you do see a lot of duplication on these bilingual packages.
Sometimes the designers get really creative to avoid duplication, though. For example, there is a food additive called “Harmónie” in Czech and “Harmónia” in Slovak. Notice that the only difference is in the last character. On the package, the word is only written once but the last character is shaped in such a clever way so it can be read as “e” and as “a” at the same time. Here’s a picture.
@dda: Thanks for the pointer. Do you know of any specific brands I could search for? Don’t really know where to start looking.
@MBM: This situation in the Czech Republic and Slovakia makes an interesting comparison with the the overlap between Portuguese and Spanish on some products here in Brazil.
The Brazilian economy is huge, so unsurprisingly the majority of products I’ve seen here are monolingual in Portuguese, but on occasion one runs across bilingual packaging, almost always Portuguese/Spanish.
The packaging on this product was particularly interesting:
But unfortunately I couldn’t find a picture large enough to show the actual text on that product. The typography is a bit less creative on this product, but it’s possible to read:
The thing that interested me about these products is that there’s a clear assymetry between Portuguese (which is always bigger) and Spanish. Presumably this means that this is primarily a Brazilian product. The “parallel” texts are very similar:
That means something like “wet shine.” (Heh, gross.) That means something like “with sun block,” and notice that there’s just a single letter distinguishing the two.BTW, MBM, I wonder if the Unicode consortium should be informed of that nutty LATIN SMALL LETTER SLOVAK AND CZECH E AND A ALL AT THE SAME TIME… ☺
Here’s a Belgian beer (a good one, btw) with a bottle with a Dutch/French label and another with an English/French/Dutch label: Hoegaarden.jpg (JPEG Image, 1800×1200 pixels)
Pat, that first link has moved to here.
[…] Y tro ‘ma mae Pat wedi blogio am gofnod ar Datblogu ynglŷn â phecynnau bwyd1. […]
I went to Canada last year and noticed that a lot of products were packaged bilingually although i only visited a part of Ontario where hardly any French is spoken (as far as I know). Much to my girlfriend’s amusement (or maybe disgust), I kept hold of packaging to photograph later.
I went to a budget/discount supermarket where everything was ‘own brand’ and it was all 100% bilingual packaging. It was a chain from what I gather, something like ‘Steve’s Store’ (or something with a guy’s name in it!).
Update: Having searched supermarkets in Canada on Wikipedia, I still can’t find name. The ‘No Frills’ logo looks similar (red, yellow black), and they have a branch in Oshawa, but their website is in English only. Could there be legislation in Canada that states that packaging must be dual language, which doesn’t apply to other things like websites?
In case it’s not obvious, there’s a link in the last post from the word ‘photograph’.
Packaging in Canada DOES have to be bilingual, websites do not, you are correct there. About the store… I did live in Ontario for a short time but I am afraid I am at a loss as to what you are referring to.
I can use a omputer, honest. trying to post this link:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/benbore/170547871/in/set-72157594170777601/