On translating the ‘bible of marketing’

1. Those translations were published between 1971 and 1981. The first one appeared 4 years after the release of the original American edition; each of the three following ones were released 1 year after their support American edition.

2. According to this thesis, the conceptualisation of translation as secondary and subordinated to an original work is based on translational practices. Far from being ‘passive victims’, translators have played an active role in establishing this vision of translation – a vision that has become dominant in the Western world. Simeoni (Citation2001) clarified the historical reasons for the development of this vision and thereby revealed the empirical foundations of the hypothesis. Postulating that language is used differently in translational and authorial writing, he claimed that this ‘translation language’ was the expression of a habitus long that originated with St. Jerome’s practice of translation. This translation posture was gradually transmitted overtime and for various purposes, became a primordial norm.

3. Interview with Lucy Petermark, rights manager, 14 October 2009, Frankfurt Book Fair, Frankfurt, Germany. As the rights manager explained, the potential for producing different adaptations is much more limited than the potential for new translations, but adaptations can serve as support texts for translations in local languages. Hence, for example, two English-Canadian editions of Marketing Management were later translated into French for the French-Canadian readership. Similarly, the Asian adaptation has been translated into Thai and Chinese.

4. In other words, we distance ourselves from Toury’s (Citation1995) definition of translation as referring to any product that presents itself as such. In this study, a translation is simply a foreign-language edition, whatever the way it labels and markets itself.

5. Further editions followed but for practical reasons were not included in the study. The 12th edition was the last produced in all three languages when we started the analysis.

6. The following people were interviewed: Christine Durieux, French translator, 30 September 2009; Delphine Manceau, French co-author, 26 January 2010; Geoffrey Staines, French publisher, 6 October and 3 December 2009, 18 January 2010; Pierre Filiatrault, Québec co-author, 13 May 2011; Pascale Pernet, higher education editorial director at Pearson France, 10 January 2010; Walter Scott, Italian translator and editor, 15 January 2013; written correspondence with one of the Spanish marketing experts and co-authors between 19 February and 8 May 2013; Philip Kotler, author, correspondence, 28 August 2013, and telephone interview on 5 September 2013. Unless otherwise mentioned, all the interviews were performed in person.

7. As Professor Kotler explained, ‘We actually have a brand, officially called the “Kotler brand”, and the brand could be hurt by being too different in different places. […] So there may be some brand control by the publishers as they negotiate.’ (Philip Kotler, telephone interview, 5 September 2013).

8. ‘At one level, I could say to my adapters: “All I want you to do is two things: (1) change the stories because many people abroad don’t know the American companies, use more of your own stories, and (2) change your descriptions of the consumers and the channels because you have got either a bigger or a smaller population, because you have got different segments of your consumers. Bring in the demographics and economics that are descriptive of your country, rather than mine.” So that would be one approach, a minimal approach where I say, “Just keep everything that is there but just make the cases and the statistics more true of your country.”A maximum approach would be “Do whatever you think, even adding new chapters. ” For example, in India, agriculture is still a very big part of the economy. Why not have a chapter called “Agricultural marketing?” And I believe they did that in the first edition of the Indian adaptation. I would work with that. Sometimes, there are some aspects of their economy that deserve a different chapter from that of the others.’ (Philip Kotler, telephone interview, 5 September 2013).

9. Philip Kotler, telephone interview, 5 September 2013. This quotation indicates that translations can sometimes contain a great deal of cultural domestication. The production of new content specifically designed for the target socioculture is always left to marketing scholars, not professional translators. These scholars are sometimes featured as foreign co-authors. They can be in charge of the whole process of linguistic transfer, or just act as scientific revisers and adapters of specific segments of the text.

10. Philip Kotler, telephone interview, 5 September 2013. There are some limits to this freedom, and they are inscribed in copyright agreements. Adaptations are only licensed under strict conditions following a selection process that may differ from one territory to another. As one of the rights managers explained: ‘Canada works a bit differently because they have been adapting for a long time, and they publish almost everything simultaneously as the United States. But if it is UK or Australia, they would put the proposal together, describing all the changes they are planning to make, they would send a CV of the persons who would be doing the adaptation, and they would send us marketing information, like the list price, how they would market it, how many copies they would plan to print, how many copies they plan they could sell within 12 months, 3 years, things like that. Adaptation projects would require that sort of information.’

11. Mercadotecnia is not commonly used in European-Spanish, but is more specific to American-Spanish. (Cf. Luís Fernando Lara’s Citation1996 Diccionario del español usual en México, published by the Colegio de México).

12. In addition to the term mercadotecnia mentioned above, we noted the following examples: mercadólogo, implementación, declinación (decline) and planeación. To these recurring terms, the Spanish co-authors added the following expressions, not common in Spain: menudeo (retail) and tiendas de abarrotes (grocery stores).

13. Similarly, in the French editions, ‘marketing concept’ is translated as ‘le concept marketing’ by the professional translator and as ‘l’optique marketing’ by the marketing specialist. The first translation is literal and rather unidiomatic, while the second renders the idea rather than the word.

14. For example, one finds mix and just-in-time. However, the borrowings are not systematic as, for example, the term ‘mix’ is sometimes also translated as ‘strategy’.

15. Clear explanations are favoured and the tone is more familiar in the European-Spanish version. In some instances, the reader is addressed using the second person singular tú.

16. For example, in the 1992 European-Spanish edition (based on the seventh American edition), chapter four, entitled ‘Marketing Information Systems and Marketing Research’ and appearing at the beginning of Part II in the American edition, was moved to the end of Part I.

17. On pp. 4, 5, 7, 21, 28 and 36 of the 1995 European-Spanish edition, the following segments and brand names have been deleted: Wal-Mart, GM, Sears, RCA, IBM, Texas Instruments, Sony, Nintendo, Mazda, The Body Shop, Ben & Jerry’s, Purdue Farms, Amtrak, US Post Office and US.

18. For example, on p. 25 of the 1991 European-Spanish edition, IBM becomes Banco Popular. Fictitious names, such as Jones and Smith, become González and Perez.

19. See in particular the section dealing with the company’s micro-environment, 1995 American-Spanish edition, chapter 6, pp. 162–169.

20. Pearson Educación S.A. de Madrid and Pearson Educación de México.

21. The title of the seventh edition is Dirección de la mercadotecnia: Análisis, planeación, implementación y control.

22. The Spanish co-author interviewed considered the American-Spanish edition unusable in Spain mainly because of the use of Latin American regionalisms.

23. Both translators and academics appear on the cover. The marketing specialists were responsible for revising the text.

24. Around the same time, Pearson, which had just opened a French subsidiary in Paris, regained the rights to the French editions of Marketing Management, formerly published by Publi-Union. When, following the death of Bernard Dubois, a successor had to be found, the selection process and criteria were very close to those governing the search for English-speaking co-authors: The candidate had to be an academic, preferably a junior one, who knew the textbook very well and was likely to prescribe it, had an excellent command of English and also had a promising professional profile.

25. Interview with Delphine Manceau, 26 January 2010, Paris. Our translation.

26. Delphine Manceau explained that she first checks the current American edition to spot the changes and select those that she finds relevant. Then she goes back to the previous French edition and marks all the revisions she wants to make. As such, this previous French edition becomes a ‘support’ version in the most literary sense. Some of the revisions made to this edition will be inspired by those derived from the American one, while others will result from her own initiative, as in the case of the integration of new examples or marketing references found in French and European journals. ‘Some passages are translated [from the current American edition]. But the basis of my work is the latest French edition, not the American one. For example, if there are some passages from the 13th American edition that I had decided not to retain in the 13th French edition, I will not reconsider this decision in preparing the 14th French edition.’

27. The first English-Canadian adaptation, by Ronald E. Turner of Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, was released in 1979. Already in the early 1950s, Canadian members of parliament were denouncing the ‘quasi-universal dependence’ of Canadian higher education institutions on American products and declaring the need to resist what increasingly appeared as a form of cultural imperialism. The release of a more local edition, co-authored by a Canadian academic, may have addressed this concern. However, comparing the seventh Canadian edition, published in 1993, with the support American edition shows that the adaptation was minimal. The macro- and microstructure are identical: parts, chapters and sections are divided in exactly the same way. The exhibits, boxes and content, as well as the name and subject indices, are also identical. The main changes are in the brand index, with about 30% of the entries being different. The textual analysis of the first chapter shows superficial changes: occurrences of ‘US’ and ‘American’ used as qualifiers for companies or agents are deleted and occasionally replaced by ‘Canadian’. Some American examples have been replaced by Canadian equivalents. Yet these substitutions are very limited in scope and number (about 40 lines are rewritten in a 60-page chapter) and many American cultural elements are maintained. With the exception of the few modified passages, the content is the same, as is the text division. In the process, a few typographical errors in the support edition were corrected.

28. Drucker, Peter F. (Citation1965). The book was released in English in 1964.

29. Scott emphasises that in Turin, Italy, continuing education institutions were partly founded by Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino (FIAT).

30. This trend appears in the following passage: ‘Some great American companies are no longer with us because they stuck to a definition of their business and their product that lost relevance in a changing world.’ (Kotler Citation1972, 25–26). The sentence was translated as Alcune grandi imprese non sono più con noi in quanto si fermarono a una definizione del loro ambito e del prodotto che perse poi di rilievo, essendo il nostro mondo molto mutevole. (Kotler Citation1973, 36). Neither the formulation non sono più con noi nor the use of the simple past is common in Italian. Also, the term rilievo is a faux ami.

31. For a short period, starting with the 1986 edition, Italian neologisms are followed by the English word in parenthesis, for example, controcommercio (countertrade); pagamento in prodotti finiti (product buyback). This bilingualism and in-translation disappears in editions produced from the 1990s onwards, where a simple borrowing strategy prevails.

32. ‘[…] because marketing was born in America […]. Marketing means “going to the market” and this gerundive form does not exist in Italian. Hence, the word “marketing” is a very useful neologism. Eventually it was adopted everywhere, including in Russia.’ (Interview with professor Scott, 15 January 2013, our translation.)

33. For example, a passage on the values and lifestyle of Italians is added, as are a few Italian academic and cultural references. Despite this, numerous American references, as well as the original statistics, are kept and sometimes glossed. Currency units are not translated either. The 1986 edition is presented as an ‘Italian version, translation and rewriting’.

34. Ente Nazionale Idrocarburi, or National Hydrocarbons Authority (ENI) was founded in 1953 by Enrico Mattei. In 1983, its name changed to EniChem. Before its privatisation in 1995, ENI was active in the pharmaceutical, tourism and publishing industries. (For more information, see www.eni.it.)

35. For example, partire in vacanza a Taormina [to take a holiday in Taormina] (p. 8) and un italiano ha bisogno di cibo o di abbigliamento o di stima, e desidera un piatto di tagliatelle o un vestito di Zegna o un’Alfa 164 [Italians need food, clothes or recognition. They want a plate of tagliatelle, a Zegna suit or an Alfa 164 car] (p. 6). The English translations are ours.

36. Interview with Walter G. Scott, 15 January 2013, our translation.

37. One of the Spanish co-authors interviewed confirmed that he and the other professors whose names appear on the front cover prescribed the book in their marketing classes. (Personal correspondence, 8 May 2013.)

38. This confirms the conclusion that had been drawn from the analysis of a much smaller corpus (Buzelin Citation2014a).

39. We have not found direct information on the sales of the Mexican editions. However, as Latin America has been one of the first foreign territories targeted by American higher education publishers (Buzelin Citation2014b), one can assume that on this territory the book was translated, at least partly, for higher education purposes.

40. This pattern is not representative of all the translations produced by Pearson France, as translators are sometimes involved in the making of translations. When the professor(s) approached by the publisher are interested but do not have time to translate the whole book, the publisher will have the translation made by a third party. In such a case, the professor(s) will be asked to identify what he/she wishes to retain from the text and what he/she wishes to adapt.