Translating marketing texts for speaking – an experiment

As part of the workweek I am currently at I set a goal to give a brownbag on “writing for speaking”. The reasons is that some of the training materials for the Mobile World Congress I recorded were great marketing/press materials but quite a pain to speak into a camera reading them from a teleprompter.

For the record: the original text is a good press release or marketing article. It is succinct, it is full of great soundbites and it brings the message across. It is just not easy to deliver. To show the issues and explain what that kind of wording can come across as I took the script apart. I explained paragraph by paragraph what the problems are and proposed a replacement that is more developer communication friendly. You can see the result on GitHub:

http://codepo8.github.io/marketing-translation/

The result is an easier to deliver text with less confusion. Here’s a recording of it to compare.

I will follow this up with some more materials on simpler communication for speaking soon.