The world is changing and becoming more global every day. For businesses to stay competitive and relevant, with the current Covid-19 pandemic, the ability to communicate effectively to global markets is crucial. Website, marketing material, and branding are all crucial areas that needed to be culturally translated to ensure your message is correctly interpreted.
Often businesses that move to international fail because of their translation, not because of their product.
Current COVID-19 Situation
The coronavirus pandemic (Covid-19) has disrupted businesses and lives around the world as companies and individuals have shifted to working from home. A vital component of communicating with co-workers and customers at home and abroad is language.
Many companies are beginning to understand the importance of educating and serving their multilingual customers and employees in the time of growing uncertainty. As customers and vendors are looking to communicate in the language that they are most comfortable with, you can help companies gain credibility and trust through providing your translation services.
This includes businesses providing answers to their questions via their social media posts, media, customer support calls, and websites that are translated to their local tongue. Making sure your message is correctly translated is crucial, as literal translation may be different from the intended message. That’s where transcreation comes in.
What is Transcreation
Transcreation is blending translation and creation, where it preserves the context, intent, emotion, and tone of the original sentences. The goal is to duplicate the original message thoughtfully and seamlessly without realizing there was a translation, giving the audience an identical emotional experience as the original source message.
It provides an effective way for businesses and brands to authentically reach new markets in a meaningful and cultural way that achieves a greater brand recognition and engagement.
This is effective when you’re doing direct marketing and outreach. A professional translator that understands context and cultural aspects is crucial to ensure the message and tone match to your business’s original intent. Helping you connect with your audience better by using cultural references and humor.
This also means adapting visual elements, including colors, shapes, and sizes to fit with cultural preferences. Often going unnoticed, little changes can make a big difference in the success of your campaign.
An example is McDonald’s. In Europe, their background is green rather than the traditional red. Evoking the idea of a healthier and more natural product.
Why Transcreation Is Important Especially during Covid-19
Marketing
Marketing Transcreation deals with converting one brand message from one language to another, covering translations for logos, taglines, and ad copy.
The difference between Marketing Translation and Transcreation is that transcreation covers the whole marketing project.
Instead of covering only Slang, Humor, Cultural References and Quirks, Idioms, transcreation considers the motives and intended desired outcome of the original advertisement. This includes the headlines, branding, voiceovers, imagery, body copy, and taglines, to ensure the audience feels the same impact from viewing the advertisement, regardless of the cultural and linguistic background.
An example is adapting an English advertisement to a Chinese audience.
Marketing Translation would translate the Mandarin text and put the translation into the existing poster design.
Transcreation may change the color scheme to have more red (Color of Happiness in China) and less white (Unlucky color, associated with loss and mourning in China)
These little things can make a huge difference in the success of your marketing campaign.
SEO
Online visibility and presence is the lifeline of all businesses. Having a website that immediately attracts attention and a marketing strategy that entices customers can be the difference in making a sale or the customer leaving.
Search Engine Optimization is the best organic way to have your ideal customers to find your business. By going multilingual, you can expand on your content writing, targeted keyword, and overall website layout to capture a wider audience range.
The more you cater to the international audience, the higher your SERP rankings, which results in more customers and sales.
Social Media Campaign
Developing an online presence is crucial for successful businesses.
Building effective channels for brand messages, creative customer relationships, and increasing business exposure results from using a social media strategy.
Most businesses fail to build a social media presence in the international market due to their lack of understanding of the country’s different regions, languages, and cultural aspects.
Creating content for your brand isn’t enough. Designing advertising pieces that connect and grabs people’s attention involves those who can think creatively while understanding how sales work.
Social Media Transcreation makes sure your message grabs your audience’s attention and ensures they understand your campaign’s intended core message.
What Happens When Businesses Don’t Use Professional Transcreation Services
There are several advantages of using transcreation services to develop a smaller, localized message about your brand. However, poor transcreation can leave a long-lasting impact on customers than poor translation.
That’s why it’s essential that your transcreation team understands your brand message and the cultural references of the audience that you are targeting.
An example of this situation is in 2011, where Puma was expanding its brand to the United Arab Emirates—looking to honor its 40th National Day by creating a limited number of shoes in the colors of the UAE. In the UK and the USA, it’s common to wear their colors to show their pride and allegiance to the country.
However, in the Emirates, the audience saw the shoe as trivializing their national flag. Also, in Arab culture, shoes are seen as dirty and filthy as it’s in contact on the ground, dirt, and water all day.
This severed Puma’s brand loyalty in the Emirates, and it’s a big reason why you need a professional transcreation service for any business looking to market their product internationally.
How The Transcreation Process Works
Research
Before starting any project or campaign, research needs to be done. Understanding the intent and purpose of your brand message and how to correctly depict its original purpose.
This begins with researching both the original culture and the targeted culture. Often little things such as color, direct translations, and religious beliefs can change how you approach the campaign.
Motives & Emotions
An advertisement campaign isn’t about the words, it’s about how they feel. People don’t buy the product; they buy it as it can help improve or change their lives. This process happens next, as the transcreation team begins figuring out the intended emotions and desires when they read your message. And ultimately what call to action they should take
Create The Campaign
With a deep understanding of the culture and intended message, the team begins to transcreate the campaign. Understanding the different quirks, idioms, and wordplays that can be used while avoiding sensitives topics.
By blending these elements, your marketing campaign will have the same, maybe even a bigger impact on your international audience.
Why Choose TranslateRight For Online Translation Services
Translated Right is a certified professional technical translation agency that provides online translations online in 50+ languages. Our translation services languages include English, Chinese, Malay, Tamil, Japanese, French, and more. Providing fast, accurate, and reliable, professional translation services for all types of documents, formats, and lengths.
With over 5000+ professional and experienced translators, we’ve filtered out the best translator using our stringent and detailed interviewing process, ensuring that you can hire only the best-qualified person for your specific translation document.
This has allowed us to simplify the whole entire technical translation process, resulting in a smooth application process.
This is seen by our 1000+ of satisfied customers from our competitive prices, friendly and efficient translation services.
If you’re looking for a translation service near me that can translate from a source language to the desired target language that conforms to the requirements of the technical side of your industry, Translated Right can help you today.
Providing a streamlined and hassle-free process, get your document translated by a professional service today.