By Muhammadu Sabiu
FrieslandCampina, a multinational dairy producer of the famous Three Crowns Milk and many others, has come under fire over the wrong translation of a billboard advertisement from English to Hausa.
Many Hausa-speaking social media users, particularly on Facebook, have taken it to their handles to criticise the company for the unprofessional translation of the advertisement.
Several of them attributed the error to Campina’s unwillingness to hire professional Hausa translators, adding that it might have been a work of a machine translation.
Attaching pictures to his post about the advertisement, a Facebooker named Aliyu M. Ahmad wrote: “Have you seen the work of ‘Google Translate’?
“This is done as if we don’t have Hausa brand designers.
“Please, somebody should translate it into standard Hausa.”
Another one, Ashir, posted, “Three Crown[s], you’ve raped the Hausa language.”
The Daily Reality has gone through social media pages belonging to the company but has not seen any responses to the criticism yet. They were not reachable for a reaction either.
In the past, many Hausa social media users complained about similarly terrible translations seen on billboards adverting one or another product in northern Nigeria.
Others called on the Advertising Practitioners Council of Nigeria (APCON) to intervene. However, The Daily Reality has not seen such an intervention from the council as during this report.
