Wondering if you need professional transcreation services (creative translation)? We’ll walk you through it so that you can decide for yourself.
Let’s say you’re into working out and like reading blog posts about keeping fit and healthy. You’ve found a website with great information, and it’s really handy and in your language, but some of it’s a bit off. The examples it uses are all about working out outdoors, which is all well and good, but it rains for half the year where you live. The recipes are great too, but you’ve never heard of some of the ingredients or even cooking methods. It keeps you hooked for a bit – it really does have some good information on it – but then you move on because, well, somewhere else may be providing information that’s more useful to you personally.
If you’d kept reading that blog, you might have wondered who was writing it and found it was a sports nutrition brand. You might have thought their content was so helpful that you placed an order. They’ve worked hard to gain your trust, so their products are certainly worth trying, right? But you never got that far. You placed your business elsewhere.
The reason the brand let a potential client click away? They translated their content rather than transcreating it.
Now imagine they’d hired a transcreation agency rather than your run-of-the-mill translation agency. It could well have made all the difference. It would have meant that while keeping the tone, style and, essentially, the content of the original, it would have been made to apply to that client. But not just that one… to all the others who speak their language and live in their country, where there’s more rain than sunshine. The same exercises could be described but adapted to be done indoors, and similar recipes provided, but with the ingredients and methods tweaked (or given a complete overhaul – it would depend on the market).
In transcreating those blog articles, the message would have stayed the same, but more trust would have been built between the brand and the client because they would have felt seen and understood.
What is a transcreator?
Transcreation specialists are usually writers more than translators, using your original text as a springboard to create entirely new content that fits your needs so that it resonates with a different culture. They have more freedom than translators and tend to be more big picture kinda people. They step back, away from the words themselves, and focus on the emotion.
The heart of a meaningful, impactful, multilingual marketing campaign? Marketing transcreation. There’s no other way about it. And we’re just the people for the job – get in touch!
