Big Bazaar: Public Relation Lessons

Recently I was at a Big Bazaar store near home for daily needs shopping. The store has gone through a drastic change as this particular outlet is recognized as a ‘Super Store’ due to the high volume of transactions as well as the number of shoppers who throng at this store. While walking through the aisle of the vegetables section, few name plates caught my attention as they had the item name in both Kannada as well as English. Impressed to see the importance that the store was giving for local language ‘Kannada‘.

However, this happiness was short-lived due to epic failures in some of the translations. See the details yourselves below, the first one was around ‘Sweet Lime’, which was literally copied from Google Translator as ‘ಸಿಹಿ ಸುಣ್ಣ’! It should have been ‘ಮೂಸಂಬಿ’ [moosambi].

Wonder who is helping folks @BigBazaar to come up with such crazy translation! #Kannada #BigBazaar #soBangalore pic.twitter.com/TVAgJPCncX

— Mohan Nellore (@mohanbn) July 15, 2017

Here is the second one which I found extremely hilarious. ‘Snake Gourd’ was printed as ‘ಹಾವಿನ ಸುವಾಸನೆ’ instead of ‘ಪಡವಲಕಾಯಿ’ [padavalakayi], again thanks to Google translator:

ಪಡವಲ ಕಾಯಿಯಿಂದ "ಹಾವಿನ ಸುವಾಸನೆ" ಹೊರಸೂಸಿದಾಗ! #ಕನ್ನಡ #SnakeGourd #Kannada @BigBazaar #EpicTranslationFail pic.twitter.com/Qhu5o16ccv

— Mohan Nellore (@mohanbn) July 17, 2017

Upon this getting viral to some extent among the Kannada speaking tweeple, Big Bazaar got into the damage control mode. Then the response that came from the official Big Bazaar twitter handle was even more epic! Here it is:

ಧನ್ಯವಾದಗಳು. Thanks for acknowledging the mistake. Get it fixed across all locations. Pls empower locals in each store to copy read! #Win-Win

— Mohan Nellore (@mohanbn) July 18, 2017

The learning from this whole episode is indeed a memorable one. Having a good public relations is very important to take control of this kind of a situation. Looking at the number of people who liked the Big Bazaar’s response is a testament for that. Now, let me leave you with the latest update I saw at the store after this translation goof up:

ಸಿಹಿ ಸುಣ್ಣ -> ಸಿಹಿ ಲೈಮ್ -> ಮೂಸಂಬಿ? #iterative #development #agile #kannada #ಕನ್ನಡ @BigBazaar pic.twitter.com/LS31jo5PMm

— Mohan Nellore (@mohanbn) July 19, 2017

By the way, I took a step more to submit the correct translation on Google to correct these vegetable names. How many of you think Big Bazaar is following the iterative progression just like the way most of software development happens in the Agile world? Will they ever get to the state of perfect translation? What is your thought?