Bantelmann Translate offers professional transcreation services for all the commercial and promotional contents of its clients.
What is transcreation?
Transcreation is a process that goes beyond normal translation, but does not go quite as far as copywriting. Transcreation refers to the process of recreating content in translation to ensure that it ‘works’ with the same intentions and effects of the original – even once it is converted into a language in which, had it been simply translated from its original form, the intentions and effects would have been lost.
Therefore, transcreation is a process that requires not only linguistic expertise, but also in-depth knowledge of the original culture and of the one in which the translation will take place, as well as a significant creative skills.
Who requires transcreation?
Transcreation services are primarily required by all clients who need a translation of promotional content. However, it should be made clear that the term „promotional” must be understood very broadly.
Transcreation is needed, in fact, as much for an advertising slogan as for the texts on the panels of an exhibition stand. In the same manner, also a leaflet written to seek participants in a clinical trial – a text which is quite far from the common understanding of promotional content – will require transcreation for it to be translated effectively.
Which kinds of documents require transcreation?
Transcreation is, as we have seen, closely linked to promotional and marketing content, and in general therefore to commercial translation.
Even within this field, however, the types of text that may require transcreation are numerous, ranging from slogans and headlines, to advertising texts, to the entire body copy of an ad or marketing content. In fact, transcreation applies more to a transversal type of text than to a type of document: it is carried out for market survey documents, as well as for film, book and series titles.
Our method and approach
Transcreation starts with an analysis of the text to be translated, identifying all those elements of the text – slang expressions, idiomatic phrases, puns, metaphors, even nuances – which are closely tied to the language in which the original text was written, and which would not have the same value – or the same expressive intensity, or the same musicality – following translation.
At this point, using their creativity and in-depth knowledge of the two languages involved in the process, the translator will reconstruct the expressions they identified, and will go beyond a simple translation to create what is effectively a new text: one that, however, is faithful to the original in spirit, meaning, and above all in its communicative effect.
The result will therefore be a promotional or marketing text – be it a single slogan or an entire page of body copy – produced so that, in the culture of the language into which it has been translated, it obtains the same effect as the original had in its own reference culture. The costs of transcreation are of course different from those of a specialised translation alone, but so is the final effect – which in marketing is everything.
Available languages
Bantelmann Translate is able to carry out transcreation processes to and from a wide range of different languages: