You are researching this topic because you have developed a written material or content that will be readable and understandable to a broad audience that is targeted in another region or country as this will aid your connection with prospective customers that use another language.
Probably, you are having a consideration of exporting your business or taking your business global concurrently, or possibly your goal is to enhance customer sales and engagement.
Well, if any of the descriptions above fits you, one thing that you will need is web content that is not only translated but also pertinent, effective, efficient, culturally acceptable, logical, and consistent for the local language of the targeted foreign market.
Handling that means you have to transcreate.
What is transcreation?
The term transcreation is a coinage of two different words. That is “translation” and “creation.” Hence, transcreation is describe as the act of copywriting or rendering the content of a source material that is expected to be logical, consistent, culturally acceptable, etc. in another language entirely.
In other words, transcreation may also be referred to “creative translation” or “translating creatively.” This is because a well translated content will not be a word-for-word rendering of the source material into the targeted language. A transcreated material is sincere and remains faithful to the main original text. This is to say that words, idioms and idiomatic expressions as well as figurative expressions are rightly adapted in the targeted language from the source.
With that, you will see that transcreation is not as simple as a word-for-word language rendition simply because you will have to consider not just the language translation but everything i.e. all aspects of the targeted language.
While a linguist can be very informed in the field of study of language, transcreation involves a natural ability to be very good at language, having the ability to write creatively as well as being versatile at copywriting. That is why it is not unusual to see copywriters and language translators collaborating and working together on a transcreation project.
Reasons why you should use transcreation for your website
Businesses targeting foreign markets needs to consider evaluating their branding and strategies of their marketing in order to draw the attention of new prospective customers. This branding and marketing strategies mean that your transcreated contents:
- Elevates brand awareness.
- Allure or attracts new business and business opportunities.
- Displays the current customer base that you are expanding.
- Exhibit cultural alertness and sensitivity.
Making Transcreation simple
To make the transcreation process easy and simple, there is a need for the use of the right software tool.
Here comes in the super tool, ConveyThis.
ConveyThis helps you to make your translation process simple, direct and straightforward by using machine translation. What are some of the things automated translation does? Automatic translation, like ConveyThis, offers:
- Ample localization and transcreation that is well conceptualized. (That is to say that the localization and transcreation it offers is more standard when compared to Google Translate)
- Fast translation process by speeding up the manual aspect of the translation process.
- Proper adaptation of the message and information you want to pass without losing the tone, essence, and style of the original material in the targeted language.
As if that is not enough, ConveyThis offers more. While it is true that we employ the use of machine translation, you have the opportunity to further refine and fine-tune your translated content by placing orders for skilled human translators from your dashboard or if you have your personal transcreators that you will like to collaborate with to make sure you have a well refined content, you can add them to your ConveyThis dashboard.
What is the origin of transcreation?
Sometimes between the 1960’s and the 1970’s, the need to adapt translations to cater for the cultural sensitivity, language efficiency, etc. of other places and countries came up to light. As a result, transcreation stands for the act of specialized translation that is more standard than any of the common general translations that are done traditionally.
Modern concept of transcreation
Transcreation has not remain the same like in the 60’s. It now plays an important role in getting the attention of consumers and potential customers in foreign territories and markets. When contents are well transcreated, the intended message will be conveyed in such a way that the audience in the targeted location will grasp all that is being communicated just the same way audience at home market will have no stress understanding your message.
Businesses thinking of going global and/or thinking of having advertisement for different markets across the globe needs transcreation in their business campaigns in order to achieve the following:
- An increased online engagements
- Creating contents that are locally relevant, culturally sensitive, and quite attractive to potential customers.
- Witnessing an increased Returns on Investment (ROI).
- Manifesting a strong online presence.
- Running campaigns that are peculiar to the local culture of the market.
- Targeting selected demographics.
- Using and applying words that may be difficult to translate i.e. brand related terms or industry based terms.
With all of these, you may now want to know what steps are involved in transcreation for you to have a success of your business. Below are the steps:
- Be sure of your reason for transcreation: rather than just waking up one day and saying you want to transcreate, have a clearly defined goal that will make you to want to start and complete the project. The reason why you want to start a transcreation project could be that you want to get prospective customers informed of a products you are about to launch. Or you may be contemplating a new campaign that will help you have an increased SEO in the location you are targeting. It could also be because you want to increase the awareness of your brand.
Whatever your reason could be, professional transcreators will:
- Make a deep research on this and see whether it is worth the resources#
- Give you the report of their assessment whether it is feasible to achieve your stipulated goals or not.
- State what you can expect as results or outcome.
- State your objectives clearly: after ascertaining the feasibility of your project and you see you can go on with the project, you should clearly define your objective for transcreation i.e. define and determine the extent to which the source material or content is to be conveyed in the targeted language.
You may ask yourself questions as ‘is maintaining context and style that important?’, ‘do I have to have little variation in the messages being sent?’ etc.
- Check your budget, calculate the expenses and fix deadline at heart: other translation methods may need little or no human touch in the process. However, you will need human experts while transcreating. Hence, it will be very expensive and it means that much time will be required in handling the project. The fact that transcreators write creatively shows that they take time to carefully transcreate and even sometimes have to review their works in another round of time. If you are overly concerned and conscious of the budget and time frame, this may affect the quality of your transcreation.
- Where and when necessary, set boundaries and stick to them: you may want to choose from the various options of transcreated content the transcreators have provided. You should, however, think about which of these options will sit comfortable well and look perfect for the style and structure of your website. Or you will want to get them informed of certain keywords that should be included in their choice of words when handling the project.
- Finally, adapt you workflow: transcreation may be especially challenging when you use machine translation. However, do not become disturb. ConveyThis is effective in dealing with such challenges.
For example, using ConveyThis, you can have a combination of human translation and machine translation. ConveyThis offers you a flexible and responsive environment regardless of the translation approach you care to use. You can easily get work delegated to collaborators on your ConveyThis dashboard. You also have the opportunity of inviting external creative writers or team members to work with you on the transcreation project.
Interestingly, you can easily integrate ConveyThis into your present workflow. ConveyThis is compatible with many CMS and even technologies that are non CMS as you can see in the image below:
Getting to know your audience better through transcreation
It is true that transcreation takes a lot of time and that it is not as cheap as mere translation. However, it is worth the effort and resources when we consider the damage bad translation can cause your business.
If you will want your international audience to feel at ease and easily relate with your contents, it is best to discard the idea of rendering the source content word-for-word in the targeted language because a word-for-word approach of translation do not always prove faithful to the source language.
With the help of transcreation, you will be able to overcome language barrier that would have ordinarily pose threats for you. The time, material and financial resources that is involved in high quality transcreation is worth it when you consider the positive effects it will have on your brand.
When you use ConveyThis, it is easy for you to handle transcreation smoothly and with ease you can have collaboration with transcreators so as to ensure that all aspect of your translation is covered. You can see for yourself how easy transcreation can be by signing up free with ConveyThis today.