Pampers: Making a mess of language

A Learning Centre that fails a literacy test on several counts.

The Site

Pampers, an international brand of baby sanitarywear, has a Learning Centre on its UK country site that fails an adult literacy test on several counts.

The centre is part of the site’s focus on practical help for parents and invites them on its introduction page to “Hear from independant experts” at the Pampers Institute. Clicking the link opens a pop-up information capsule which in its opening sentence says that the experts work together “in nnovative programmes” in alliances with “major professional organizations”. Their knowledge extends to “gynecology” among other areas of child health and development. Elsewhere on the introduction page is a wrongly conjugated In the News headline (“The nappy debates continues…”) and a utility link to “Other Country”, which leads to a directory page for 37 Pampers country sites.

The Takeaway

Pampers UK’s use of language is as much in need of cleaning up as the wearers of its nappies and just as likely to leave adults gasping. Its errors also cover too wide a range of sins to be excused as an ‘accident’. They include basic wrong spellings (‘independant’ instead of ‘independent’), confusion over which form of the verb to use with a plural noun (the nappy debates should ‘continue’), shoddy proof reading (how else did “in nnovative” slip through?) and so on. There are also two uses of American English spelling – “gynecology” and “organizations” – that may well strike a UK audience as odd. Pampers has an American parent company, but it is hard to argue the copy has been lifted wholesale from corporate literature when words on the same page such as ‘programmes’ and ‘paediatric’ are correctly spelled for a British readership.

It’s easy to have a laugh at such an obvious horror show, especially when it appears under the banner of a “Learning Centre”. But it does raise some questions about content generation and maintenance that you might want to think about when the chuckling dies down. How confident are you that nothing like this could slip through on to your site? Or that it would be picked up if it did? And do you know how to moderate your English so that a local audience feels at home on their country site?

First published on 17 May, 2007