Do you transcreate for lifestyle brands? Here’s how I do it exactly.

Let me dispel that first myth. I just mentioned the word ‘exactly’ but transcreation is not an exact science.

The way you transcreate one project may be completely different from the way you transcreate another.

This article is based on my experience transcreating projects into Greek – for the cosmetics and skincare industry especially.

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One mistake I find a lot of beginner transcreators make is trying to emulate the source text’s sentence structure. This never ends well.

Advertising texts are written very creatively and with the source audience in mind.Transcreation is usually an afterthought, so trying to translate in the way the source text has been written is a big mistake.

When I say ‘creative’ I am not just referring to the use of words but also to the way sentences are structured.

For example, English uses a lot of gerunds in beauty and cosmetics texts that don’t translate very well as gerunds into Greek.

“Sitting pretty on your skin, it will envelop you in its luxurious aroma.”

What I might do in this case is create a verb out of the gerund and all of a sudden you end up with two sentences instead of one. In fact, it’s very common when you have that gerund structure, to take one sentence in English and break it into two or three sentences in Greek.

What you mind find happening next, is that you end up with two or three slightly incomplete sentences. And this is where some additional information needs to come in to flesh out those incomplete sentences. This could be anything from additional adjectives to creative synonyms for the product you are writing about, etc.

Where do you find that additional information?

For starters, from the very text you are looking at. There might be a very nice adjective in the next string that you can bring up to the string you are currently working on.

Or from the company’s website. Read any related texts that might inspire you to come up with beautiful sentences that fill in those gaps.

Oh and a request for TRANSLATION AGENCIES.

I keep on mentioning the word ‘string’ because I do a lot of that work on CAT tools but it is my belief that when faced with such creative texts, you need to break away from such restrictions and strings can be very restrictive sometimes, especially when you end up turning a sentence on its head to make it flow better in the target language.

Creative texts don’t need to be as precise and accurate as legal or medical texts.

It is ok to translate the same adjective in two different ways.

It is ok to translate two adjectives as three and three adjectives as two, if it flows better in the target language.

It is ok to take one sentence and create two. Or vice versa.

If you feel you've made a sentence a bit shorter than you'd like, compensate by making the next sentence longer.

With advertising texts, the information is as important as the flow and the rhythm of the sentence. In fact, I would argue that the rhythm and flow are perhaps more important because they are the vehicles that will elicit an emotional response from the reader. With advertising texts you don't want the reader to read a text and say "great, I learned something new today." You want them to read the text, feel something and hit the BUY button.

What you must NEVER do:

Don’t end up writing the complete opposite of what the source text says. 

And because this is advertising, don’t make any claims that the product cannot support.

Bottom line, transcreate the concept rather than the sentences they give you.

Resources:

1) If you are interested in transcreation and localisation, Vistatec are doing a FREE webinar tomorrow on: “Translating Without Source Text – A Hybrid Approach Between Localization and Copywriting” Click on the link above to register, if you are interested.

I’ve submitted a question to them that I would like to ask you too:

“What should an independent proofreader’s approach be to proofreading texts without a source? Should they do a monolingual proofreading instead or not?"

What do you think?

A couple of years ago I was working on another transcreation project, this time for the travel industry. I was given source texts written by a UK-based marketing agency but the texts were about bars and restaurants in Greece that I knew quite well either because I had visited them before or because they were kind of a big deal in Greece and I knew them from the media.

I ended up writing a lot more in my target text than there was in the source text and I have to admit that being a writer helped too. ??  

As luck would have it – it seems the translation industry is quite small – the marketing agency decided to send my work to a translation agency for proofreading. That translation agency though happened to be one of my regular clients so one of my PMs contacted me to ask me if I could proofread my work – she didn’t know it was my work of course!

I turned down the project explaining that this was in fact my work, so I couldn’t proofread it but I left a comment for the proof-reader. I explained that this was not going to be a regular proofreading job, and that I had re-written all the texts with additional information.

This kind of approach depends on the project of course. With some projects you cannot break away from the confines of the source text and write whatever you want.

2) If you want to get into transcreation Delfina Morganti Hernández is organising a transcreation webinar for the 18th of July :

“Stepping into the realms of creativity – an introduction to transcreation”.

If I judge by the reviews she received from her previous webinar, it must be the bomb and you should definitely check it out. Here’s the link to register: https://bit.ly/transcreation-register

I hope my article got you thinking a bit about the dos and donts of transcreation. I'd love to hear what you think about it.

Natali is an English into Greek translator and localisation specialist and a bilingual content writer. Click here for her FREE 5-day writing course.