Transcreation: why creative adaptation of your message is important

If you want every single nuance and idiom of your message to be preserved when it’s translated, ensuring it has the same impact as it did in the original language, you need transcreation. As its name indicates, transcreation involves going beyond literal translation.

Simple translation often isn’t enough to enable a message to resonate deeply with target audiences who speak other languages. Whether due to cultural differences or because there are expressions that lose their meaning in other languages, sometimes it’s necessary to depart from the original text and come up with a more creative translation. This is particularly important in the literary world, in marketing and in advertising language.

Marketing to a global audience

At CPSL, we work with a multidisciplinary team of highly creative professional advertising copywriters with extensive experience in marketing. We can translate not just words, but feelings, ideas and reactions. Transcreating doesn’t involve simply translating words, but putting ourselves in the shoes of the target audience, trying to imagine the impact the message will have on them and to determine whether we have achieved our aim.

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FACT: Examples of transcreation are everywhere in our daily lives. Who hasn’t heard of the famous Coca-Cola slogan “Taste the feeling”, which was translated into Spanish as “Feel the taste”? And then there was BMW’s slogan “Sheer driving pleasure”, which was translated into Spanish as “Do you like to drive?”. Sometimes, deciding not to translate can also be transcreation. For example, the McDonald’s slogan “We’re loving it”, or Nike’s famous motto “Just do it”.