Transcreation: How Marketing in Multiple Languages can Make a Difference

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For most businesses today, operating internationally is second nature. Thanks to the internet, we can ship our products and interact with customers around the globe. According to Forbes, a brand’s identity must be global, making translation indispensable. This naturally means investing in translation to ensure the best possible result in each target market, taking into account local customs and cultural sensitivities. 

According to a CSA Research survey of Fortune 500 companies, organizations that increased their translation budgets as part of their marketing strategy were 1.5 times more likely than their Fortune 500 peers to record an increase in total revenue. Most companies that decide to make this investment will assume that what they need is marketing translation. However, there’s another choice: transcreation. Let’s investigate for what purpose each one can be used and how they differ.

Marketing translation

Let’s say as part of a company’s globalization strategy, they have some longer marketing materials that need to be translated; say, newsletters, online content, brochures, product descriptions, event information, or corporate presentations. For such content types, marketing translation is the best choice. 

After all, the purpose of a marketing translation is to drive sales, promote awareness, or enhance the image of the brand. The original copy is usually creative in nature, so the translated version needs to reflect the same level of creativity. Although a faithful literal rendering of the source text is an absolute no-no, the degree of freedom as to how much the translation is permitted to deviate from the source is much more limited than with transcreation. For example, the translation is still very much influenced by the source content and retains aspects like images or the layout. When transcreating content, these are often adapted too — but we’ll get to that in a moment.

Transcreation

So how exactly does transcreation differ from marketing translation? According to the official definition by TAUS, transcreation is called on when it comes to translating a source text with a highly creative component, which is significantly influenced by the brand and the campaign particulars.

Transcreation is typically needed for shorter advertising texts, and for more brand-driven content where the principal goal is to resonate with the target audience. Typical examples of this type of copy are slogans, taglines, and headers.

Here, the target version is more concerned with conveying the desired impact on the target audience rather than producing a faithful literal rendering of the source.

It’s clear that the transcreator needs a high degree of creative freedom to be able to capture both the factual and technical aspects of the content as well as the desired emotional effect on the international reader. That’s why a solid project brief with all relevant brand and campaign details is an absolute must for a successful transcreation.

Not only that, but the transcreator also needs to take into account relevant particular social, cultural, or even political elements — all factors that might create an effective emotional impact on the target audience.

Any transcreated content is, therefore, much more subjective than a marketing translation, so the company needs to be able to trust their chosen transcreator and carefully select them to ensure the best result.

The emotional effect of transcreation 

Since transcreation supports cross-cultural marketing, it needs to go beyond literal equivalence and faithfulness to the source content. What it needs to do is recreate the desired emotional response the source content elicits in the reader.

Transcreation, therefore, needs to adopt a more holistic approach than marketing translation. Transcreators don’t just look at an isolated piece of written content ; rather, they address the entire context of the message, including the campaign strategy and visuals and so forth.

The objective of transcreation is, therefore, to transfer not only the meaning of the source language message into a target language, but also its intent, style, tone of voice, and especially its emotional effect.

Local and global

To do this successfully, major focus needs to be placed on cultural elements such as local customs, values, and sensitivities, idioms, humor, or the socio-economic context of the target group. Visual elements like icons and colors also need to be adapted to the cultural preferences of the target market.

The major added-value of transcreation as part of a global marketing campaign is to be locally effective in each target market while still complying with the brand or company’s global strategy.

After all, a cultural faux pas in a campaign can damage a brand in ways that can be difficult to repair. 

Some examples of transcreation

Souq.com: 

Souq.com is Dubai’s largest online retailer until recently acquired by Amazon. When it wanted to introduce the famous American ‘Black Friday’ sale in the United Arab Emirates, the company chose to go with the transcreated name ‘White Friday’.

The reasons behind this transcreation are, for one, that Friday is the day dedicated to worship in Muslim countries, and secondly, in Middle Eastern culture the color black has a negative connotation because it is associated with mourning. White, on the other hand, is associated with innocence and thus has a positive connotation.

If Souq.com had called its campaign ‘Black Friday’, this would have likely caused offense in the target region and the campaign would have backfired. It’s important to bear in mind that colors have different meanings and implications in different countries, so their use should be very carefully evaluated during the transcreation process.

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Apple: 

Apple initially advertised its iPod shuffle mp3 player with the slogan “Small Talk”. But, as language industry expert Nataly Kelly points out in her book Found in Translation, that short slogan proved quite difficult to translate. In English “small talk” is an idiomatic phrase, which can’t be translated literally. Although other languages may have similar idioms, they may not contain the word “small”, so the wordplay would be lost.

In the end, Apple had to recreate the slogan from scratch for its different target languages and even local language variants — in other words, the slogan had to be transcreated.

And here are the results:

French: Donnez-liu de la voix (“Let him speak”)

Canadian French: Petit parleur, grand faiseur (“Says little, does a lot”)

Latin American Spanish: Mira quién habla (“Look who’s talking”)

European Spanish: Ya sabe hablar (“Already knows how to talk”),

Although all of these slogans differ significantly, they all communicate the same idea: astonishment at how much this small device can do.

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Honda: 

Honda’s “Fitta”’ model had to be renamed to “Honda Jazz” in Scandinavian countries because the company realised that the word “fitta” is a vulgar term in many Nordic languages. Commissioning a transcreation rather than a mere marketing translation before the launch would have prevented this embarrassing cultural mistake. And Honda could have saved a lot of money because the company spent a fortune on the “Fitta’ marketing collateral and branding before the faux pas was noticed.

Final thoughts

Given how much time, money and effort companies put into creating their brand and brand strategy, investing the same amount into each language or country version should be a matter of course.

As confirmed by the “Can’t Read, Won’t Buy B2C Report”, which surveyed 8,709 consumers in 29 countries to analyse preferences for customer experiences in one’s native language versus a foreign language, consumers feel more comfortable when they can do business in their own language. So if a business offers its customers a natural-sounding platform in their own language, it will gain their trust and increase the organization’s chances to make a sale. 

Although transcreation requires more time and resources than a traditional or a marketing translation, the extra investment will likely pay for itself many times over in the long run. 

Featured Image Credits: Halacious on Unsplash