Western businesses tempted by the low rates charged by Indian companies for copywriting services – SEO copywriting, web content writing and so on – would do well to consider the styles of English which Indians use.
For many, English is not their first language. Hindi is the majority language among many others. The likelihood is that outsourced copywriting may come back as something which is not what would be regarded as ’standard English’. Even worse, it may read like ‘Hinglish’, a hybrid argot which has acquired a certain cachet among India’s middle classes!
That’s not to say that Indian companies dealing with SEO and website design don’t produce good work. They do. Copywriting, however, is different in that English has many hues. In the same way that Chaucer’s English is divided from modern English by a big chasm of time, so present-day Indian English (or even American English) is separated by geography. To paraphrase the saying: the UK and US are divided by a common language.
Indian copywriting tends to reflect the more formal English syntax used 50 years ago – or more. Before any work becomes usable, a time-consuming editing process is usually necessary. Suddenly, this can make the low fees much more expensive. As any copywriter will tell you, there’s often as much work involved in a ‘re-write’ as there is in producing original copy.
Where more colloquial English is needed – as in ads, sales letters and (to a certain extent) with websites – it’s essential for the copywriter to be on the same cultural wavelength as his audience. Without cultural empathy, the sales process is severely compromised.
