Transcreation
TRANSCREATION = Translation + Creation
The art of culturally appropriate, marketing translation
Transcreation is a creative type of translation that’s specific to marketing and advertising. Much thought and attention go into developing a marketing campaign and assets to reach a particular demographic in English. The same creativity and care should apply as you extend your marketing campaign to a new country or a new culture.
Transcreation gets to the heart of your message to deliver the same cultural impact in any language. Transcreation dives much deeper than written words. Verbio analyzes your brand, message, tone, and style to weigh the cultural meaning of each phrase, allusion, humor, and visuals. Verbio partners as your Cultural Consultant to do a deep dive and provide recommendations around your graphics, fonts, color palette, and music. Our ultimate goal is to adapt your overall message, so it is culturally and linguistically tailored to your target markets.
Transcreation results empower you to take your brand and message directly to your new audiences, without losing anything in the translation process. Paired with Verbio’s International Trade and Cultural Consulting, your brand will be set up for success as you expand into new global markets.
TRANSCREATION VS TRANSLATION
Translating creative copy for marketing and advertising requires creativity, foreign language copywriting experience, cultural insight, and a more collaborative workflow. Applying the ISO-standard translation process commonly results in matter-of-fact or literal translations. It’s tempting to want to use Transcreation in every language-based project. However, there are clear use cases for each service.
Transcreation
Transcreation considers branding, slogans, calls to action, subtext, wordplay, humor, and subtleties during the cultural adaptation process. We also consider a broad set of cultural cues and contexts to make the copy fluid and compelling in the target language. Thus, Transcreation is the better choice for advertising, marketing, branding, identity, slogans, tag lines, campaign names, campaign production, blogs, creative copy, targeted cultural copy, copy evoking action, emotional appeal, identity messaging, humor, political, or SEO terms and phrases.
Emphasis:
| Beliefs | Meaning |
| Behavior | Rhythm |
| Color | Slang |
| Customs | Style |
| Emotions | Tone |
| Ethnicity | Traditions |
| Expectations | Values |
| Humor | Wordplay |
Translation
Translation is a great choice when the target language should remain faithful to the exact content in the source file: product manuals, medical topics, press releases, help documents, legal terms, or anything where the content is meant to be informational in nature. Learn more about Standard Translation.
Emphasis:
| Accuracy | Punctuation |
| Comprehension | Readability |
| Clarity | Rhythm |
| Flow | Slang |
| Formatting | Style |
| Grammar | Terminology |
| Idioms | Tone |
| Meaning | Wordplay |
At the end of the day, we want your translated copy to have the same impact as your original copy for your specific target audiences and specific purposes.
COLLABORATIVE WORKFLOW
Transcreation involves a more expansive and creative workflow than ISO-standard translation. Before we even begin with the tasks related to translating the text, we first engage with your team to understand your goals and desires. We ask you to describe your concept, creative brief, objectives, and success metrics along with the key market(s) you’re targeting. This informs the transcreation team about your ambitions regarding style, cadence, tone, color palette, images, audio elements, and many other factors.
Verbio’s transcreation team includes an array of cultural consultants, copywriter/translators, and graphic designers, as we ultimately reimagine your creative assets and copy from within a whole new cultural context. Our transcreative writing may deviate from your original copy to create a culturally appropriate message that evokes the desired audience reaction. We present the content along with optional backtranslations and notes.
An interactive and multifaceted workflow helps you understand our thinking and collaboratively make decisions in the best interest of the campaign. This engagement also keeps your creative team intimately involved and on course with your, and your client’s, expectations.
Graphic Design
Transcreation delves beyond the text alone. Verbio critically assesses how a new demographic will respond to your graphics, fonts, and color palette. Working alongside Verbio’s cultural consultants, our graphic designers have intimate familiarity with visual design skills and foreign glyphs to create visually appealing assets: social media posts, web design, print design, billboards, posters, brochures, and more. Verbio primarily uses Microsoft Office tools and Adobe Creative Suite to help redesign your new foreign language copy. Our graphic designers have deep and broad experience with Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, Storyline, PowerPoint, and other software. We have even been known to design custom logos and artwork for our customers from scratch. Learn more about Graphic Design.
Audio Video Assets
As audio and video take center stage in marketing campaigns, Verbio is equipped to co-create or re-create audio tracks or subtitled videos in new languages for your radio ads, tv spots, YouTube videos, podcasts, and other marketing videos. Learn more about Audio Video Services.
International Market Entry
In parallel with the above creative processes, Verbio boasts an International Trade Consultant vetted by US Department of Commerce. First she will ask you to describe your strategic goals for entering a new market(s). Then she will offer you a targeted series of resources to support those goals, potentially addressing export financing, freight logistics, international law and compliance resources, market research for your industry, introductions to government market strategists, B2B matchmaking, and grant funding to pay for most of the above. Learn more about International Trade Consulting.
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Translation
Marketing Translation and Transcreation
