The Perils of Writing French PPC Ad Text

I recently had to set up a French campaign for a PPC client. Having a holiday home in France and visiting every year since I was 2 years old, I speak pretty fluent French...after a few glasses of vin! So sans alcohol, I began to panic a bit. I started thinking of keywords and ad text and worrying that the right accent wasn't on the right letter and that my ad text would mean something entirely different to what it was meant to say.

I wanted to double check my work and remembered using Google Translate to find bigger and better German words to add into my coursework during my A Levels (I didn’t necessarily use them in the right context but they sounded and looked impressive).

All in all it does a pretty decent job. The main issue is that it translates word for word and doesn't take some of the grammatical structure into consideration. The general consensus on forums is that for European languages, Google Translate works pretty well. Some of the more amusing examples of botched translations are from languages such as Japanese and countries further afield.

Whether using Google Translate or another online translating service, mistakes are bound to be made and we must all understand that you obviously won't get the same results as if a human were to translate for you. There have been some forum comments from genuinely angry people who are ranting and raving about the terrible service.

I tested my ad text in Google.fr to see if the keywords brought up similar ads which, if you are using a translator for PPC purposes, is a good testing process. Just make sure you double and triple check what you are doing so that you don’t end up with things like this!