A few weeks ago, an acquaintance of American origin showed me a screenshot of an email that another friend of hers received, both in Spanish and English:
TranscreationTranscreation
Here's the story: "Is this translation correct?" her friend asked her. Her answer was a resounding no, and that's because there's a serious mistake in the first sentence. The translator should have translated "España en EEUU" to "Spain in the USA", because using the preposition "at" and not including the article in front of EE.UU. loses the meaning they were really looking for. Her friend's response was to be outraged when he discovered that they had sent him something poorly translated. Even if he wasn't a native English speaker, that poorly written text damaged his opinion of the brand.
I come across things like this very often. The same acquaintance lebanon phone number data told me about an Instagram account, “ That Ain't English ”, where users can send their contributions and examples like this luggage tag:
Transcreation
In this case the correct text would be "It's private”, but when the past tense and the adjective "private" are the same in Spanish… there can be confusions like this.
So the question is, how do we prevent this from happening to our content? The answer is simple: use transcreation.
Transcreating is not translating
If there's one thing I've come to firmly believe as a content expert, having spent so much time working in multilingual contexts (along with talking to friends and acquaintances who are certified translators), it's that transcreation is the future .
Transcreation is the “process of adapting a message from one language to another while maintaining its intent, style, tone, and context.” As this definition indicates: there are many more factors to consider in the process and it is more complex than simply taking the message in one language and translating it into the equivalent in the target language.
While it is true that some marketing content can work with standard translation, we must always take into account cultural nuances when adapting content to different markets.