Overkill

At the second of the two baby showers thrown for me and TANK last week, I got the most curious gift. Actually, the gift itself was pretty normal: a standard-issue rattle with little animals on the front. It was the packaging that caught my attention...

At the top of the back of the package, there was a paragraph that said something to the effect of:

Babies love rattles! Studies have shown that rattles are good for babies' hand-eye coordination. Rattles are important to a baby's development. Your baby will have hours of fun with this rattle!

Okay. Good to know. Maybe a little more enthusiasm than strictly necessary, but okay. There are a lot of baby products out there, so you can't blame this company for doing everything they can to generate interest in their otherwise unremarkable rattle.

Here's the thing that really got me: this enthusiastic little paragraph was deemed so vital that it was reprinted in FIVE MORE LANGUAGES! Yes, I had the pleasure of reading how entertaining and important this little rattle is in English, French, Spanish, German, and Italian. I didn't read the Dutch version because I don't read Dutch.

What really caught my eye was the fact that the washing instructions and any safety warnings were only printed in English. The only part they bothered to translate was the "rattles are great" portion of the text. It seems to me that if they're going to go to the effort to translate this information into a grand total of six (count them, SIX!) languages, the least they could do would be to include the pertinent stuff along with the "rah-rah-yay-rattles" stuff.

The whole translation effort just seems like overkill to me. Most expectant mothers, regardless of their native language, know the basics of rattles. If they're smart enough to figure out that they're pregnant, they're smart enough to figure out a rattle.