June 29, 2007

McDonald’s Develops International Nutrition Icons

The fast food giant has created new nutritional icons for over 109 locales.

How does a company create “language-free” icons that will communicate to dozens of cultures? McDonald’s has taken up this challenge by developing new nutritional icons which will be used in its restaurants worldwide and also made available to the food and restaurant industry as a whole.

In one of the largest cross-cultural communication projects of its kind, McDonald’s worked with the ENLASO corporation to create the new visuals. Eight criteria were set up to evaluate over a dozen icons in locales ranging from Fiji to Slovakia. “Feedback from iconographers was often surprising and sometimes even amusing,” reports a Market Wire press release. “An image of a bone to represent calcium was rejected due to its regional association with dogs, while a simple abstract image of a four-leaved plant, symbolizing fiber, was interpreted as everything from a Christmas tree to Marijuana!”

In this case, McDonald’s has gone one step beyond localization by taking into consideration cultural differences in order to develop a single new international iconographic system.

Language Translation Inc. is pleased to bring you the latest news from the language service industry through our news blog and our monthly newsletter. Our company operates out of San Diego, California and has provided translation, interpretation and localization services to major corporations such as Jack in the Box, Sony, and Century 21. Contact us for a free quote. “We speak your language – and theirs.”

Betty Carlson

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	Language Translation, Inc.
	Language Translation Inc., a San Diego-based company has been serving the U.S. and countries abroad for over 17 years with professional document translation, certified conference interpreting, and software / website localization services.
	http://www.languagetranslation.com/

Topic Tags: certified interpreters, certified spanish translation, globalization, glocalization, language interpretation, language translation, localization, professional document translation services, professional interpretation services

by Adriana Nevin

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