L’Oréal Professionnel: I Suggest you Hire a “Professionnel”
My biggest pet peeve strikes again: another ad campaign featuring unforgivable grammar mistakes.
L’Oréal Professionnel has a sponsored post on IG (Instagram Ad): a teasing video, probably about a new hair product (my guess).
The caption of the video reads as follows: Why repair something if it doesn’t last?
The caption is then translated into Arabic and reads: لما علينا تصليح أمراً لن يدوم؟
The minute I read the above Arabic sentence, I was so angry. How did they manage to make 2 huge mistakes in a 6-word short sentence? 2 words out of 6 are grammatically incorrect.
Here is how the sentence should read:
لمَ علينا تصليح أمرٍ لن يدوم؟
Or
لماذا علينا تصليح أمرٍ لن يدوم؟
For those of you who might say: but these are not huge mistakes (mais c’est pas grave voyons!) I tell you: spare us your philosophical nonsense.
We live in the Arab world. The post targets Arab people, hence it is translated to Arabic. It might as well be grammatically correct!
The thing with social media campaigns nowadays is that companies are not hiring professional copywriters for the job, which often results in awful campaigns (such as this one).
There is no excuse for successful companies not to create appealing ads that still manage to be grammatically correct. All it takes is double checking, maybe even triple checking. Don’t rely on just one person. There has to be someone proofreading to make sure it’s all good to be posted!
UPDATE: Upon checking their Facebook Page, it turns out it is indeed a new hair care product as pictured below: