(This was the beginning of it all: the article I entered to win a free car rental. I won. Ultimately, this lead me to doing articles without entering contests to win free car rentals. Call it a Canadian kind of moment. I lost.)

I want to learn to speak Hungarian. Hey, you gotta dream. But nothing strikes fear in my heart more than reading some Hungarian translations into English. I figure if it’s that hard coming out of Hungarian into English it must be equally hard going in. It’s only logical. And heaven knows, if there is one thing Hungarians have down to a science, it’s logic.

One could argue (another noteworthy Hungarian pastime) that there is even a special and unique Hungarian logic. Take my Rubik’s cube. Please. But back to the translations. Sure, there are the many restaurant menu translations that leave you wondering what’s for dinner. But most restaurants are small businesses and probably can’t afford professional translation services.

Winging it.

However, there are larger and quite respectable firms who either elected to do the translations in-house or went outside to firms that should be giving them their money back. For example, consider the good folks at Wing, formerly Wallis Real Estate. They recently went to the trouble and expense of doing a four-colour newspaper insert. They’re expensive. I know. I used to own an advertising agency in Canada.

Like most inserts, the Wing insert had a lot of words in it. And some of those words are quotes from their ‘team’. For instance, “Its office buildings feature spacious variable enterieurs (sic) and modern design, the solutions of which are a step ahead of the demands of the era.”

OK. What’s for dinner?

Don’t get me wrong. I have a huge respect for the Hungarian culture and Hungarian people. From what I have seen, this is a highly educated society inhabited by highly cynical and gloomy souls. My kind of people. I feel right at home.

The decision to translate any marketing materials into English (or German or Japanese or American or whatever) is a business decision. And obviously, there are good business reasons to do it.

Take dental tourism, for instance. The skills of the Hungarian dental community are gaining global recognition and local prices make dental work here very competitive. When my wife and I arrived in Budapest last January, we stayed for a few days at the iconic Gellért Hotel. In our room we found a four-colour brochure promoting a dental clinic located next to the hotel. Like the Wing insert, a lot of thought and money that went into this brochure.

The brochure featured descriptions of the clinic’s services and capabilities and provided a photograph of the four dentists who had formed the business. Beside each photograph was a quote from said dentist. The last one on the list, a clean-cut and pleasant-looking young man and probably a capable dentist, had the accompanying quote: “We are so that your teeth should be future time.”

Easy for you to say

I am not being critical. I don’t speak Hungarian. When I try, I usually make people laugh. (I like making people laugh but not by butchering their language.) Of course, there could be a strategy to translations such as “We are so that your teeth should be future time.” I mean, I thought long and hard about what that dentist meant. I even kept the brochure and would go back to it from time to time trying to figure it out. Do you know how hard it is to have consumers keep your brochure and actually have them read it over and over? That’s the Holy Grail of advertising.

So maybe there is some wisdom here after all. It is human nature to try to complete incomplete pictures or fix something that is wrong or understand something that doesn’t make sense. It’s part of how we evolve and it’s the way our brains are wired. Maybe this is a Hungarian conspiracy to get us to read and remember messaging. If it’s not, maybe it should be. People love to find mistakes. If you don’t believe me, screw something up on your Hungarian tax forms and let me know how things go.

Since almost every company and every nation is trying to find new ways to generate revenue these days, maybe it’s time to launch Hungarian English Marketing Inc. Like dental tourism here, it could be a whole new industry. We simply take English language marketing materials, translate them into Hungarian and have another Hungarian translate them back into English, publish the results and there you have it. Highly read, highly memorable, highly engaging advertising.

The Holy Grail. Who would have thought? Hey. Just because I’m not Hungarian doesn’t mean I’m not a genius.