Asparagus anyone?

This food packaging example is a favourite of mine because it’s a very simple solution. I don’t know if it’s the first time it has ever been done, but it really caught my eye when I first saw it.

As you may know, Belgium has three official languages; Dutch, French and German. It’s also a country where people are rather fond of asparagus. Dutch, French and German are also of course the languages of Belgium’s four neighbours, the Netherlands, Germany, Luxembourg and France so by creating packaging that uses all three languages they have covered the home and easily reachable export markets.

All of the packaging for this asparagus (yes, I know, asparagus doesn’t need packaging, but that’s a different question) is tri-lingual Dutch / French / German and has been achieved using a standard technique of displaying the relevant blocks of text one after the other in the respective languages.

Where this packaging differs slightly is in the use of the word Belgium. It’s Belgian asparagus that the producer is clearly proud of this and uses it as a selling point. Therefore they wanted to make sure that the word Belgium is very prominent. But if you have to say it in three different languages that that’ll take up a lot of space on what is a fairly small wrapper

So here’s the solution.

The word Belgium in Dutch, French and German all share the same stem “BELGI” but all have very different and distinctive endings.
So the designer has attached ending for all three language variations to the same stem.

Doing so means that the stem “BELGI” has to be large to accomodate the three different endings and drives the message that this is Belgian asparagus home.

A simple multi-lingual sign in Brussels

Our first example is not going to win any design awards, but I’ve picked it because it highlights some of the basic interesting points to consider in multi-lingual design.

It’s a small sign on the main door of a major Belgian department store in Brussels which most shoppers probably don’t even register consciously. It uses four languages; French, Dutch, German and English respectively. And here it is.

Using four languages is slightly unusual here as most signs in Brussels are bi-lingual (Dutch / French), but the most interesting feature of this sign is that they have used flags to indicate which section of text relates to which language. This is probably because the text of the sign is translated into four languages and the use of non-text elements helps the reader to quickly identify which section of the sign is “their” bit.

But we often see flags used on bi-lingual and multi-lingual Web sites to help a reader pick the language in which they want to use the Web site so it’s not an unusual design technique.

Read more