Marketers are often plagued with a dilemma when reaching out to a new market: to standardize or to localize? With marketing localization, you are able to create linguistic and physical adjustments to your existing products or services so it fits in with your new target market’s specific needs.
Marketing localization moves beyond merely translating existing standardized marketing collaterals to another language — it involves a thorough study of how culture and market conditions affect customers’ buying behavior.
What is Marketing translation?
Marketing translation is required for a source text with some cultural and/or creative influence which aims at promoting awareness, sales or the image of a product, service or brand. Given the (partly) creative nature of the source, the translation also needs to reflect the same degree of creativity and goes beyond just a faithful rendering of a source text.
It requires a (partly) creative process in most cases. But, although it would typically include some elements of transcreation, it can’t be considered as full transcreation as it is still very much linked to the source text.
How is it performed?
The translation needs to demonstrate a complete understanding of the message, while factoring in any cultural sensitivities in the target output.
The degree of freedom as to how much "deviation" from the source data is allowed is more limited than with transcreation (for example in changing images or layout)
Which content types are typical candidates for Marketing translation?
Longer content marketing material such as brochures, web content, product collaterals, event information, some corporate presentations and some marketing-led newsletters.
What is Transcreation?
The task of transcreation is to render a version of a source text which displays a highly creative component, and is deeply influenced by brand and campaign information.
The starting point is still a source input, but the target output will be more focused on conveying the desired impact on a specific target audience (for example: a targeted group of users, a whole country, or a specific region), rather than remaining faithful exclusively to the source content.
How is it performed?
To achieve this, transcreation requires a high degree of creative freedom in order to capture not just the factual and technical aspects of the content, but most of all the desired emotional effect on the audience. It is therefore highly dependent on the project brief, and all relevant brand and campaign information.
Besides this, it also needs to take into account all possible factors that give it an effective emotional impact on the target audience, such as specific cultural, social and political elements.
As a result, transcreated content is by nature more subjective. This means that the stake-holders must have considerable trust in the transcreator.
Which content types are typical candidates for Trancreation?
Transcreation is required most often for shorter advertising content, and in more brand-orientated content where the principal aim is to resonate with the audience. Think of taglines, slogans, headers or straplines.
What is Copywriting?
The creation of content from scratch in one or multiple languages for a brand or campaign is what we call monolingual or multilingual copywriting. Other possible names for multilingual copywriting are: cross-market copywriting and international copywriting.
The content is created based on a detailed briefing by the client, following brand and campaign requirements.
What clearly distinguishes copywriting from transcreation is the absence of a source text.
How is it performed?
This is often a process undertaken collaboratively by writers of different languages, but each writer must be free to create a text which works for the specific target audience.
Copywriters need a certain amount of freedom to be effective, but a detailed brief from the client is vital to the copywriting process.
The client is then normally invited to give feedback on each language, and various editorial stages may then follow, as with monolingual copywriting.
A copywriter will generally be a writer trained in a specific field (for example: technical, marketing, or games) and may or may not know another language.
Which content types are typical candidates for Copywriting?
The content types that can be created this way can include both long and short creative copy, from general marketing material to slogans and taglines, depending on the available budget and time. Most likely only the most influential and more brand-sensitive content would go through this process, which tends to be more expensive.
Multilingual Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the new services that is becoming increasingly important in the broader context of content creation.
For a multilingual website, creative human linguistic work plays a significant part in these processes. In this context, multilingual SEO will cover both national and international searches so that the keywords are specific to the target market or group.
Ideally, multilingual SEO is embedded into the content translation process. But it is a user-oriented technique, which can’t be limited to translating search keywords from one language to another. It is essential to do specific research on the search keywords for a specific market or language.
Multilingual SEO is not defined by fluency or accuracy, but rather by the marketing goals set for the content, resulting in a target that might deviate from the source to deliver the expected search results.
