Transcreation texts

The advertisers and their fellow marketers use this term to say that a message needs to be translated retaining the idea of the author, the style and the context.

Creative translation services

Transcreation is about taking a concept in one language and completely recreating it in another one. Let’s take a delicious example. A donut in English source text can become a croissant in French and a bun with poppy seeds in Ukrainian one. Transcreation allows you to speak with an audience in an understandable language and to get the same reaction from translated text as from the source text.

But transcreation implies work not only with the text, but also with images and videos. The translator should take into account the cultural characteristics of the target audience, its customs, habits, history, sense of humor and so on. This type of work can only be done by a native speaker. The outcome, therefore, should resonate with the intended audience. 

What is transcreation in translation

It gives an opportunity to establish a strong emotional contact with an audience. Because, if  things are confusing and irrelevant, we usually lose interest to them. Subsequently, such a contact helps to boost sales. 

The term “transcreation” is not new. It was already widely used in the 60s and 70s in advertising industry. In the 80s, the term broke into the video games. A new approach to the language adaptation of games allowed to get much more attention from the users. Of course, it is more pleasant to hear not only understandable words, but also familiar phrases. But the game creators went further and began to adapt the characters, background, change plotlines, so that the game captivates users around the globe.

This term may be difficult to remember. Therefore, advertisers substitute it with localization, creative and marketing translation, language adjustment, cultural and international adaptation.

Transcreation has established itself as an effective tool, which helps to increase the demand for the products and services in the targeted countries.

P.S. While we were explaining to you what services are hidden behind this term, Google Documents struggled to convince us that we made a spelling error in the word “transcreation”, which in fact should be “transcribation” or “transcription”, or even as “translation”.

While automatic spell-checkers demonstrate their conservatism, people improve their skills and services. Therefore, order transcreation in MK:translations and don’t take risks with Google Translate.