McDonald's Symbols Lost in Translation?

by Lauren Nemec

If you've eaten at McDonald's anytime within the past year or so, you may have noticed the strange symbols on the food packaging that are meant to represent nutritional information. They look something like this:

If you have any health education, it might be easy to make some educated guesses about what the chart means, but do you think the average McDonald's consumer can fully interpret everything?

Here is the nutritional chart decoded:


What do you think? Is the 'fat' icon is, as they say, 'an easily recognizable measurement tool'? It looks like a display on a stereo system to me. Does the icon with the three dots looks like a salt shaker? I suppose it might, now that you mention it, but I never would have deduced that on my own. Did you even notice the gray shaded areas or dotted line representing daily allowances? I suppose I was too busy decoding the icons.

These days, many global companies opt to use illustrations and symbols rather than incur the cost of translations into multiple languages. If you've ever bought furniture from IKEA, you know what I am talking about.

Ikea's 'instruction people' show you rather than tell you how to handle and assemble IKEA products.

How can a company choose a group of icons that will mean the same thing in any location in the world, without causing offense or confusion? It's quite a challenge and McDonald's did not go at it alone- they enlisted the help of a language services provider.

As this trend grows, more language services providers seem to be offering cultural evaluation services for companies using images, symbols and illustrations in their documentation. Experts (such as marketers or iconographers) evaluate symbols against a certain set of criteria to determine possible cultural offensiveness or insensitivity, appropriate use of color, similarity to existing symbols, ease of comprehension, etc.

I'm sure the language services provider that McDonald's used to analyze their icons did a quality job, but I would question the person who developed these icons. They say a picture is worth a thousand words. But I say, unless you can show me the right pictures, I'd rather have the words.