Transcreation: Preserving Your Brand's Creative Flair in Global Markets

If you’ve got a lot invested in your creative content — whether it serves to convert prospects, carve out your brand niche or carefully groom your burgeoning international reputation — transcreation will be an unavoidable pit stop on your path to global.

Bring Local Flavor to Your Marketing Campaigns with "Transcreation"

The Acclaro blog entry below is featured today on the Content Bureau Blog. The Content Bureau is a full-service copywriting agency that creates custom content for business, consumer, and technical audiences.

You and your team have spent hundreds of collective hours and thousands of dollars on the launch of a great marketing campaign in English. Along the way, everyone gained a few new grey hairs. Whew! You’re done, right? Bring out the Champagne, bonus checks and hair dye. Not so fast…your boss wants to take that campaign into eight new language markets. Now you need a great global campaign.

How do you ensure that your campaign maintains the impact of the original without having to launch new creative in each market? This is where marketing “transcreation” comes into play. Transcreation is a freer form of translation, closer to copywriting. The result is a text that’s linguistically and culturally adapted for specific countries and/or regions, be it for Latin America, Africa,  Europe or even local U.S. Hispanic markets.

3 Steps for Translating Marketing Campaigns

Marketing materials pose a particular challenge to companies that want to sell their products or services to new language markets. Some typical concerns are:

• How do you ensure that your translated materials maintain the impact of the original?
• How do you name products, translate idioms and maintain consistency across languages without having to launch brand new marketing campaigns for each market (just thinking of all the costs — new creative, photography and production — can make a marketing person cringe).

The answer is marketing "transcreation" — the process of linguistic and cultural translation that makes marketing make sense whatever the target language (or languages).

Here is a quick three-step guide to generate the best marketing translations possible so your products sell just as well in Buenos Aires as they do in Beijing or Boston.

Step 1:  Assess your original campaign and content. Evaluate the goals of the campaign and, if the campaign is already in a market, look closely at the concepts, graphics and headlines to assess their cultural relevance and appropriateness in the target market. Selecting concepts, copy and graphic elements that work across cultures is key to the campaign’s success.