Transcreation: Tips and Tricks in Achieving a Winning Translation

Marketing today can not understate the content, when it comes to campaign success. When it comes to international markets, however, it’s clear that simple literal translations fall short. This is where transcreation comes into play–adapting persuasive texts to align with the cultural nuances and sensitivities of each country, ensuring they retain their impact. Let’s look at what it entails.

The Significance of Transcreation in Advertising and Marketing

Globalization opens up abundant business opportunities for companies of all kinds, but harnessing them requires linguistic and cultural adaptation.

This means that texts are no longer crafted solely for a specific community; they now have a broader reach across different environments, cultures, and languages. At this point, it’s clear that merely translating marketing texts falls short. You need to go beyond that. Why?

Because literal translations lack the efficacy needed to effectively promote products or services. Texts in advertising, art, and marketing must convince and resonate with the nuances of their target audience.

To achieve the desired objectives and make a meaningful impact on potential customers, you need to find the right message. In this context, transcreation is a key tool for penetrating different markets. It goes a step further, going beyond literal translation, aiming instead to evoke emotions and connect with consumers.

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What Transcreation Entails

Transcreation goes beyond simple translation. It involves adapting ideas and content to the target language in order to evoke the same feeling and emotion as the original text. This may require using different words altogether.

The process is intricate, because communicating, addressing, and interacting in another language is different. At its core, while the message's intent remains unchanged, its style must adapt to the cultural norms and tone of the target market.

And this is the main difference between translation and transcreation. While translation faithfully renders the original text into another language, transcreation offers more freedom to reinterpret it.

In translation, both content and style remain the same. Transcreation, on the other hand, must adapt to the audience and their culture. This could involve employing metaphors, finding linguistic turns of phrase, adding or omitting text, and adjusting sentence structure or linguistic register.

To achieve all this, two key elements come into play in any marketing campaign: persuasion and creativity.

Transcreation and New Markets

Transcreation and copywriting are two highly complementary tools for internationalizing any campaign. The transcreator handles linguistic adaptation in the broadest sense, while the copywriter creates messages in line with the defined strategy. In both cases, the aim is to connect with the audience and evoke emotions.

Transcreation is key to unlocking the international market, while copywriting is important for the domestic market. Both share a common goal: stirring emotions, which is vital for audience engagement.

That’s why businesses aiming to expand beyond their own borders must invest in advertising translation services. Without them, connecting with audiences in these new markets becomes significantly more challenging.

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The Power of Transcreation in Internationalization

When expanding a company’s services internationally, it’s important to understand the many advantages that this special translation service offers:

• The fusion of translation and creativity is a powerful tool for boosting sales.
• It resonates with the audience and aligns people with the business objectives.
• It boosts the willingness of consumers to engage with products and services.
• It demonstrates an understanding and alignment with the values of the audience, facilitating smooth integration into new markets.
• It contributes to improving SEO rankings.

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The Transcreation Process

This form of creative translation is designed to broaden a company’s market reach. But unlocking its potential requires a specific process:

1. Research. With the marketing briefing in hand and access to the objectives, you’re ready to get started. Achieving success is impossible without a deep understanding of the client, the target audience and their culture and language.
2. Preserving the essence. After gathering all valuable information, the message is then tailored to the audience. Still, the creative message must be compared with the client's vision, style, and goals to maintain its essence. Linguistic tools suited to the target audience’s language are then selected.
3. Transcreation. The key here is creativity. The words must effectively convey the message, and ongoing communication with the client is vital. They provide feedback, refine nuances, and give approval. For slogans, offering multiple versions enables the client to choose the one that best articulates their message.

Success Stories with Transcreation

There are countless cases of internationalization where transcreation has played a key role, as literal translation proved ineffective and unsatisfactory. In fact, the acclaim of certain companies is due to a meticulous process in which the syntax and emotional resonance of their message were adapted to the specific locale where it is being promoted.

Let’s look at some of the most famous examples.

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Leroy Merlin

The slogan of this French DIY company is: “Et vos envíes prennent vie”, which translates literally to: “And your desires come to life”. But does that make sense? Is it inspiring? Emotional? Not at all.

Ensuring the slogan retained the same impact required turning to transcreation. Following a thorough analysis of the Spanish market, it was found that the audience values joy, practicality, and autonomy. Consequently, to resonate better with the Spanish audience, it was modified to: “Da vida a tus ideas” (“Give life to your ideas”).

While the essence remains unchanged, the approach and emotional connection of each phrase are significantly different.

In Italy, a similar approach was taken and the slogan was changed to: “The Home for Your Home”

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Procter and Gamble

Once again in Italy, American company Procter and Gamble had to adapt the message of its Swiffer product. The original message was: “When Swiffer’s the one, consider it done,” conveying the idea of reliability.

However, this didn't resonate with Italian consumers. Instead, the message was changed to “La polvere non dura, perché Swiffer la cattura”, which immensely successful commercially, This message was meant to say “Dust doesn't last, because Swiffer captures it”, a sentiment that resonated more with the Italian market.

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McDonald's

Even though the product is a hamburger, this company engages in a vast transcreation campaign in all aspects. Indeed, certain products vary depending on the country, adjusting to the ingredients found in different regions. This approach allows customers to relate their daily lives and eating habits to the food offered by this restaurant.

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Top Tips for High-Quality Transcreations

When aiming for top-notch results, entrusting your project to a company with seasoned professionals is essential. Expert transcreators blend expertise with creativity, supported by other skills:

• Proficiency in both source and target languages.
• Deep understanding of the culture, values, and sociocultural nuances of the target country.
• Creative flair to translate and fully adapt the message to the required context.
• Advertising and marketing acumen to fulfill the campaign’s objectives effectively.

Attaining such excellence demands careful consideration. That’s why we recommend using a professional translation agency. At Linguaserve, we offer guidance on whether your campaign requires translation or transcreation.

And while we harness cutting-edge technologies, we don't leave the results to chance. They are just tools, while our qualified translators and staff are in charge of the entire process, ensuring you get the best results.

At Linguaserve, we specialize in transcreation and advertising translation, which is why we’ know we can help you design advertising campaigns that are successful anywhere in the world. With vast experience in marketing and advertising, we're committed to leveraging all our expertise and skills. Together we’ll propel your company to international success!