We can assume that the importance of having documents translated into the language spoken by our international customers is clear to everyone. But are we sure that formal correctness is all a translation needs for it to really function as a tool for communication and sales? In reality, in some cases, the accuracy of a translation and its precision are not enough: other factors come into play that are even more essential for the translated text to perform its function.
As trivial as it may seem, let's try to ask ourselves what exactly “translating a text” means. We could define this operation as the transformation of a content from the language in which it was originally written to another; an operation that serves to ensure that that content becomes perfectly understandable to those who know this second language but not the first.
But here we are at the key point: what does “perfectly understandable” mean? Is it a mere fact of grammatical and lexical coincidence?
To understand the answer to this question, let's simply look at the English idiom "It's raining cats and dogs", used to indicate torrential rain, and ask ourselves if it remains understandable if it literally translated into any other language.
Evidently, it doesn't work. There is a whole layer of meaning that is not contained in the words, but in the cultural references that those words evoke - references that may exist in the source language but not in the target language. And in these cases, translating - that is, transferring meaning - can no longer be a matter of grammatical transposition alone.
The process that becomes necessary in the cases of which we have just presented a trivial example no longer technically has the name of translation, but that of transcreation (https://www.bantelmann-translate.de/en/transcreation). Let's quickly go over the differences between the two practices.
A translation in the strict sense is as literal as possible: it is the one we need, for example, if we are translating an official document, an instruction manual, a pharmaceutical leaflet. In a translation we aim to convey a meaning that is contained entirely in the choice of precise terms and the structure of the text: if we use the correct terms and combine them in a grammatically exact way, we can be sure - subject to the minor localization details relating to units of measure and similar trifles - that the original meaning will be preserved.
In transcreation, on the other hand, we always talk about the reconstruction of a text in a different language, but we are dealing, for example, with advertising or marketing messages. In this case the meaning we want to convey, as we mentioned before, is not entirely contained in the text, but develops by creating images in the mind of its target that arise more from the references it makes (to popular culture, to idioms, puns, catchphrases, famous figures) than they are conveyed by the words of the text itself. It is clear that at this point a literal translation, even a perfectly correct one, will not be able to convey the desired meanings, and that to obtain this result an almost complete rewriting - in any case one with substantial modifications - of the text will be necessary, taking into account all references specific to the recipients of the new message.
This is exactly what transcreation is.
As we have seen above, transcreation comes into play especially in the field of marketing, where slogans and payoffs used by companies can often lose their communicative effect when translated. We mentioned the problem of different cultural references - think of a joke about Little Red Riding Hood told in a country where that fairy tale is unknown - but sometimes the question can be even more technical, such as in the case where the effect of a slogan original depends above all on a rhyme - a very difficult element to maintain in translation. Of course, in addition to proper marketing documents, this process can be applied to TV or radio commercials, magazine advertisements, websites, and any other type of message.
Not all translators can do transcreation. Obviously, the basic requirements of the former also apply to the latter, who must in any case have an in-depth knowledge of the language and culture of the source message as well as those of destination; however, it is necessary to add to these characteristics creative and writing skills that allow to grasp the core of the message and translate it into a form that, at the same time, generates the same effect as the original in a different language, avoids taboos and concepts that are unpleasant for the target language, and maintains musicality and conciseness where necessary.
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