After writing and every other regional language is either shoehorned ignorantly or ignored, here are 2 examples of TV advertising!
The first is by Britannia, for a contest they are running via Milk Bikis, for a free educational trip for children and their parents.
Here’s the TV ad.
The Tamil ad (right at the beginning of the ad) starts with the mother wondering aloud, “Mun kaalathula avan astronaut aaga poraana?”, in Tamil.
What she meant was this: “I wonder what he’d become in the future – an astronaut?”.
What she said was this: “I wonder what he’d become in the past – an astronaut?”.
‘Mun Kaalathula’ means ‘in the past’. For ‘in the future’, it should be ‘Edhir kaalathula’!
The campaign website indicates that this is specific to Tamil Nadu – observe the huge header image, with a product pack that has the contest name in Tamil!
For a Tamil Nadu-centric contest and campaign, for which even the product packs have the name of the contest in Tamil, it is really odd that the ad. agency did not seek the inputs of a Tamil-speaking person while writing the voice-over script!
The second TVC is for Fortune Oil.
The Tamil ad has so many mentions of ‘masala vadaa’ (as used by people outside TN) instead of how it is called in Tamil Nadu: ‘masaal vada’ (with a half-‘a’ in the end; or ‘masaal vadai’). This is simple, conversational Tamil that you’d realize if you had lived-in experience in the state.
I applaud these brands’ efforts to fit-in with the local milieu, but I also wish they get appropriate people to check what they are producing. Half-hearted, poor translation is very awkward.