Transcreation: Pride and Prejudice III

*Read Part I* | *Read Part II*

Today, for my third and last article on #transcreation prejudice, I have chosen to address a rather specific issue that links transcreation with a brand’s digital marketing and advertising efforts:

#3: Transcreation can be used as a one-size-fits-all solution for a brand’s marketing campaign across platforms.

Transcreation is in high demand today. Global brands, advertising agencies and translation companies are seeing the need to use transcreators to meet target audiences’ expectations by increasing the relevance of their marketing communications (MarCom).

So you've identified the need to use transcreation for your next project. You are an online business willing to hire transcreators to do their best at conquering a target audience within a certain market. Or you are a translation company in dire need of expanding your lines of business and meeting clients’ demand for transcreation.

When it comes to translating a brand’s marketing assets from one language to another, it’s not enough to just spot the need for transcreation instead of regular localisation. You have to be aware—and let your clients know—that just as the creative and marketing teams have not used exactly the same catchy line on a blog post when they crafted the copy for a web banner or a Facebook ad, so will be the case with the transcreation team: in all likelihood, it will be necessary to adapt the source copy to fit the different formats and character limits posed by the various ad platforms the brand aims to use.

Now, I’ve been working in transcreation for several years now, long before what I like to call the ‘transcreation boom’ (nowadays), and it is fascinating to see just how close the transcreation pipeline is to the copywriting process often carried out by a brand’s creatives. As opposed to other services in the translation and localisation industry, transcreation is a hybrid concept infused with marketing, branding, copywriting, cultural adaptation and even literary translation ingredients.

As a result, the transcreation process closely mirrors the phases involved in the creative process behind every MarCom strategy: from market research to brainstorming and re-writing, transcreators often imitate specific tasks traditionally attributed to a brand’s marketing and copywriting teams. From this point of view, transcreation may as well be defined as a cross-cultural duplicate of a few key phases involved in a brand’s copywriting and marketing processes.

As such, a brand’s ad copy transcreated for signage purposes may not be equally effective on a Facebook ad. In turn, a brand’s transcreated copy aimed at Facebook users may not prove to be as relevant for Instagrammers. Each advertising platform has its own rules. The marketing team knows it. The copywriting team knows it. And a professional transcreator knows it too.

So how can brands, advertising agencies and localisation companies ensure consistency despite the need to adapt their copy to several different platforms?

1. Create a clear and specific brief for the project that addresses the differences between each platform and warns transcreators against adhering to each platform’s expected style and number of characters.

2. Provide context to transcreators, whether it be descriptive metadata, reference URLs, screenshots, explanatory notes, etc.

3. Given a certain ad campaign, use the same transcreator or transcreation team across platforms.

Hope this article’s helped shed some light on transcreation as applied to digital marketing campaigns.

Transcreators, any further insights on the different ways brands can help ensure consistency across advertising platforms?

*Read Part I* | *Read Part II*