Transcreation

Advertising and Marketing Texts

Taglines, headlines, and other creative marketing copy often use language-specific and cultural elements, such as idioms, puns, word play, subtext, rhymes, assonance or alliteration. If translated directly into another language, these elements may not make sense, or worse, can be potentially offensive and harm the brand in question. Instead of a straightforward translation, they need to be ‘transcreated’ to ensure their intended impact is retained.

By using our transcreation service, you can rest assured that your message gets across effectively and in a culturally sensitive way. Rather than just translating the source material, our transcreation teams use cultural and linguistic expertise drawn from the target market to produce a culturally appropriate version without losing the impact of your source text.

Copy Adaptation

Not only highly creative advertising texts require creative translation. Although we never ‘blindly’ produce literal translations but rather strive to convey the message in a way that feels like it was originally written in the target language, there are translation projects that benefit from an approach in which more distance is taken from the source text than would be expected in an ordinary translation. In order to convey the intended message in the best possible way, a native speaker of the target language who is also an expert in the relevant industry will creatively rework the original copy. Word play, idiomatic expressions, colloquialisms, humour and cultural references are among the elements handled at this stage.

Copy adaptation may be the right choice for texts such as advertorials, entire websites needing to be tailored to various markets, or texts for job openings, which follow different conventions from country to country. Overtaal can ensure ‘cultural localisation’ for all your communications.

Copywriting approach

Transcreation services encompass drafting, testing, and refining stages – similar to the workflow used by advertising agencies to write source copy – in order to ensure the desired effect in the target language. This is a collaborative process between Overtaal and the client. We will present the client with several options, which may include back-translations and detailed explanations of why specific words or phrases were chosen. Together, we will determine the best final language that we think will resonate most with your target audience. The same process can also be applied to copy adaptation jobs where appropriate.

Render taglines or creative copy in any language

• Nuances, tone, and meaning of the original maintained
• Not a direct translation – native-speaking linguists re-create a culturally appropriate version of your tagline or longer copy for the target language
• Wordplay, puns, alliteration, culturally specific references, etc. accounted for
• Back-translations put you in charge of the message conveyed

Transcreation and copy adaptation still start from a source text in a different language than the target language. However, sometimes it is more efficient to write in the target language(s) directly, and why we also offer multilingual editing and copywriting services.