We had to translate this document a while ago – it was a mix of explaining new technology with advertising text, so the client obviously needed a native speaker to translate the text, then a technical specialist to adapt the localised message, then an advertising creative to continue the work of the first two so that the end result was both clear, accurate and fitting to the market. The reason is simple: the target audience is different from country to country (and often from area to area) for each brand, and what is appropriate in one place may sound absurd, uninteresting or even offensive in another.
For example, for a popular detergent priced below the market average, ‘the best’ (from which it should really be understood that it offers the best value for money) may not be the most appropriate promise, and there may be a need for wording that also indicates that the product delivers the promised quality at an affordable price, in which case ‘best buy’ may in fact be the optimal solution.
Localisation in marketing and advertising translations is therefore very important. In addition to domain knowledge, it requires a deep understanding of the culture for which the translation is being done and the specifics of the target audience, as well as attention to those details that turn the advertising text into a natural-sounding messenger for the target audience, as they will not hesitate to tax inattention to detail and either not buy the product or ridicule it on social media.
So in marketing and advertising translations, there are several levels that need to be covered by the translator, and usually there is no one translator who specialises in all of them, so such a translation necessarily becomes a team effort, and collaboration with local marketing and advertising teams, who can give guidance to translators, is not optional. Such translations need to be carried out with the help of copywriters, especially for reasons of ‘creative translation’ or transcreation (a compound term which combines two specific processes: translation and creation). The ideal translator in such cases is multi-skilled – a copyright translator specialising in the more or less technical field of translation – a true unicorn. This mythological being translates the text, then uses their impeccable creative skills to find the ideal wording to convey the client’s message as faithfully as possible, but adapted to the market and other constraints that may relate to the field of translation, the space available for the text, the culture of the area for which the translation is being done, and so on. It is obvious that we do not easily find such multidisciplinary specialised translators, so we resort to the solution that solves all problems: collaboration.
Nor does this sure-fire method solve all the problems that an advertising or marketing copy poses, because in this industry, time is pressing. It’s just that while a translation can be done fairly quickly, especially if we also use automated tools (which we’ve been talking about recently), a creative translation focused on a specific field can take a very long time. Translating a single phrase can take anywhere from a few seconds to an hour or even a day or two, because it involves an act of creation, which in turn requires inspiration, and inspiration is often expensive (and rightly so).
In the end, we can only wonder how long the brilliant translations for slogans of some of our favourite brands will have taken? Was each of them a mere split second when the creative came up with the perfect rendition of the original, or did the process actually take days and was a team effort?