Transcreation

Let’s Craft Culturally Considered Copy

“For a global brand, it’s critical to adapt to local cultures while maintaining the core values of the brand.
This balance is what drives both local relevance and global success.” Chang Ma  – VP of Marketing – LG Electronics

What is Transcreation? 

Transcreation, short for translation + creation, is a specialised tool that goes beyond literal word-for-word conversion. Unlike traditional translation, which focuses on mechanics like grammar and syntax, transcreation prioritises the bigger picture: cultural context, tone, and emotional impact, making it particularly effective for marketing and advertising content.

The Transcreation Process

1. Understanding the Source Material: The transcreation process begins with a thorough analysis of the source content. Our copywriters invest time to understand briefs and stimulus documents, and extract the core intent, style, concepts, and terminology.

2. Market Research: Transcreators conduct market research to understand the cultural nuances and preferences of the target audience and concept. This research informs the adaptation of the content, ensuring that it is culturally relevant and impactful.

3. Creative Adaptation: Using insights from the source material and market research, transcreators recreate the messaging. The goal is to retain the original “spirit” of the communication while making sure it resonate within the target language and culture.

4. Client Collaboration: Typically transcreation is a collaborative process, we typically create multiple versions of the copy, including back translations, rationale and recommendations to guide clients to the message that aligns best with campaign objectives.

5. Visual Check & Timecodes: For multimedia assets, we provide a visual check to ensure localised text and imagery aligns with timecodes and static spaces. This step is particularly challenging in languages with longer sentence structures, requiring careful editing and condensing, or sentences that need to be split between lines. 

Transcreation often extends beyond simple adaptation, becoming a consultative task during the content creation phase. Transcreators may provide guidance during the conception stage, ensuring that content is developed with a global perspective. This approach enhances multi-market consistency and effectiveness.

Concepting & Tagline Testing

Concepting and tagline testing are integral parts of the transcreation process. Here’s how it works:

1. Collaboration and Understanding: Transcreators collaborate with clients to understand the creative communication campaign’s goals. This collaboration involves in-market content specialists who provide advice on how cultural differences might impact the desired outcome.

2. Ideation Sessions: Transcreators often participate in ideation sessions or respond to briefs, helping to identify which concepts are globally resonant and which are culturally specific.

3. Feedback and Analysis: Transcreators analyse and provide feedback on taglines, concepts, and creative decisions. They identify when a particular concept, talent selection, or communication piece is unsuitable for an international market and suggest ways to transcreate or rework it for optimal impact.

The art of balancing accuracy and creativity

One of the key challenges in transcreation is striking the delicate balance between faithfully conveying the original message and creatively adapting it for a new audience. Transcreators need to be cultural chameleons, possessing a deep understanding of both the source and target cultures. 

Bosch: #LikeABosch

A great example of complex transcreation is ‘Like a Bosch’ campaign, which leverages the play on words of the catchphrase ‘Like A Boss’. This tagline is impossible to transcreate and is left in English globally, but the script also has a lot of complexity, as it is a bespoke rap in the backing track, which references features and elements related to the product, while inserting humorous elements and rhyme.  

To take this campaign internationally is a complex transcreation challenge. The script needs to be entirely reworked to meet the local language requirements, while retaining the same pacing and rhythm, and incorporating locally relevant concepts and humour to connect with international audiences. 

Like A Bosch – French version
Like A Bosch – Spanish version
Like A Bosch – Vietnamese version 

Bosch has been able to successfully adapt this campaign into multiple markets, and produced regional variations of the shoot (Americas vs EMEA vs APAC), which were then overlaid with local market voice over. 

Read more

How to make an ad really German? Ask Adidas

Level up your global brand identity with transcreation

Get in touch