The last thing you need is to fall in love with a name that has inappropriate or negative connotations for some segment of your target audience, whether they speak Spanish, or German, or Swahili. That’s why it’s absolutely critical to submit names headed outside the U.S. to a rigorous linguistic and cultural evaluation.

Catchword’s Global Performance Scorecard (GPS) is a highly structured analytic system for identifying all of the potential snags and strengths of a particular name candidate in your key markets. To give you an example, our GPS once saved a company from naming their new kids’ game the equivalent, in Mexican Spanish, of “He Screwed Up.” It also saved a global brand from calling itself “To Vomit” in German. The cautionary tales abound.

More than a disaster check, the GPS assesses the strengths and weaknesses of name candidates across a variety of criteria. Besides probing for undesirable associations, we research whether a name is hard to say, sounds odd in a particular language—or resembles a competitor’s.

We also consider whether a name is appropriate for both the brand and the culture it must live in. And we assess how well a product name or company name transmits desired messages.

Of course, an evaluation is only as good as the evaluators. Catchword’s global linguistic team is the best in the industry.

We have immediate access to language experts who speak virtually every language and dialect in the world. Even Canadian. (See below.) And unlike typical translation services, our network of specialists is comprised of native speakers who actually live in the countries in question. So they’re aware of cultural nuances that a translation service might miss. They’re also knowledgeable about branding and advertising, so they can evaluate names (as well as logos and taglines) from a marketing perspective. And they conduct probing interviews that go well beyond “person-in-the-street” reactions, to identify potential branding issues and cultural concerns.

We conduct linguistic testing in just about every spoken language on Earth, and have had some exposure to Klingon and Ewokese. However, here are the ones we most commonly encounter: