Translation and a Transcreation

The important differences

Translation is not a word-translation job: there is much more. There is word meaning, there is sentence meaning and there is a coherent message for the whole document (a catalogue, a proposal, a legal document, a software application, a web page to be visited by hundreds or thousands of people). Meaning goes beyond stringing words together, and conveying full messages means even recreating the feeling for your target audience – this is not an easy business.⁴

Translation is not merely an interlinguistic process. It is more complex than replacing source language text with target language text and includes cultural and educational nuances that can shape the options and attitudes of recipients. Translations are never produced in a cultural or political vacuum and cannot be isolated from the context in which the texts are embedded. ³

Depending on what language you are translating, the same language may translate differently between countries, as words may convey different meanings depending on the location that they are used. Mistranslating the word or meaning may become offensive, and some of the literal translations are not always correct. Therefore, keeping the meaning and the original message from the source text in the language translation process becomes more of an art rather than a science.⁵

So, what is transcreation? Transcreation is the process of adapting a message from one language to another, while maintaining its intent, style, tone and context. The phrase has previously been used by advertising and marketing professionals looking to transfer the meaning of a message into a new language without losing intended meaning.

Transcreation refers to the process of taking a message that was created in one language and conveying it in another language, without the loss of salience. While, in theory, any message is a candidate for transcreation, the bulk of transcreative work performed to date has been in the advertising industry in media such as brochures, TV and radio ads aimed at end clients, and posters and flyers distributed to resellers. Websites are also the subject of much transcreation.

The goal of transcreation is to transfer the intent, style, vocal tone, and emotional salience of the message from the source language to that of the targeted audience.¹

For truly creative pieces, translation needs to be taken a stage further, which is where transcreation comes into play. Transcreation expands upon translation by focusing not so much on the literal text, but on discerning the emotional response by viewers in the source language and working to elicit the same response from viewers in the target market. It is about “taking a concept in one language, and completely recreating it in another. ²

One could argue that any translation job is a transcreation job, since a good translation should always try to reflect all these aspects of the source text. This is of course true. But some types of texts require a higher level of transcreation than others. A technical text, for example, will usually not contain many emotions and cultural references and its linguistic style will usually not be very challenging. However, marketing and advertising copy, which is the type of copy to which the term transcreation is usually applied, does contain all these different aspects, making it difficult to create a direct translation. Translating these texts therefore requires a lot of creativity.¹

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