The Role of Creativity and Emotion in Transcreation

Transcreation is a writing discipline, and the thing being written is not a sentence but an effect. The brief is the feeling the original copy produces in its own audience; the deliverable is copy that produces the same feeling in a different one. That is why the work cannot be checked by comparing it with the source.

This piece is about the craft itself: what emotional equivalence means in practice, why colour and humour and formality are part of the job, and how the creative decisions are kept disciplined rather than arbitrary.

It is the companion to transcreation and translation: their distinct roles, which decides which content gets this treatment. Here we assume that decision has been made and look at how the writing is done.

Key Takeaways

• Emotional equivalence, not linguistic equivalence, is the test. A line can match the source
  exactly and produce the opposite effect.
• Four things have to arrive together — language, emotion, culture and the brand’s
  tone of voice. Getting three of the four is how copy ends up accurate and wrong.
• The creative latitude is bounded by research done before writing starts, which is what
  separates transcreation from improvisation.

We define transcreation as “creative translation”, a process that adapts the emotional expressions and contextual relevance of the source message that goes beyond literal meaning of words. Four things have to arrive together for it to work: language, emotion, culture and your brand’s tone of voice.

What emotional equivalence looks like

Take a Japanese traveller reading about a hotel in Spain.

A translation will tell them the amenities, the location and the room types, accurately. What it will not necessarily do is make them feel the warmth of Spanish hospitality, the pull of a local festival, or the particular pleasure of eating late. Those are the things that sell the stay, and they are carried by which details are chosen, how long the sentences are, how much is stated and how much is implied.

Transcreated copy makes those choices again for the new reader. It may foreground different details from the English, because what reads as enticing differs by market. It may be shorter or longer. It will almost certainly not have the same sentence boundaries. Judged against the source it looks unfaithful; judged against the effect it is the only faithful version.

The two-campaign contrast

The clearest way to see the difference is to run the same campaign both ways.

One brand renders its campaign into the target language accurately. The copy is correct, the claims are right, the grammar is clean, and the whole thing reads as something imported — recognisably a translation, with the slight stiffness that marks one. The other rebuilds the campaign around the same intent, using the references, register and rhythm the market responds to. The copy is not a version of the English. It is the same argument, made locally.

Readers do not usually articulate the difference. They simply trust the second brand more, and we would be inventing numbers if we told you by how much. What we can say is that this is the problem clients describe when they arrive: they have experienced badly translated content, copy that was more direct than creative, and they want the second outcome instead.

What else carries meaning besides words

A page is read as a whole, and several of its signals are not linguistic at all.

• Register and formality. How formal the brand is, and how it addresses the reader, is a decision per language rather than a constant. A setting that reads as confident in English can read as blunt in one language and distant in another.
• Humour. The least portable element in marketing copy. Humour that depends on wordplay or shared cultural reference rarely survives, and the honest answer is often to replace the joke with a different pleasure rather than to attempt it.
• Colour. Colour carries meaning that varies by market — red reads as celebration and good fortune across much of Asia and as warning or passion elsewhere — which affects campaign assets as much as copy.
• Imagery and season. Seasons invert across the equator, and a photograph that signals aspiration in one market can signal something else entirely in another.
• What is left out. Some markets expect detail and specificity; others read the same detail as over-explaining. Deciding what to omit is part of the writing.

How the creative latitude is bounded

Creative licence without research is just improvisation, and it is the reason brands are nervous about transcreation.

The safeguard is the step before writing. Entering a new market, the work is to read the brand’s own materials, settle the style and tone, and uncover the market-specific technical jargon and colloquial terms the content will need — the words a reader in that market actually uses for the thing being described. That produces a written set of constraints: what the brand sounds like in this language, which terms are fixed, what must not change.

Only then does the writer have latitude, and the latitude is bounded by those constraints. The effect is that two different writers working on the same brand six months apart produce copy that sounds like the same brand — because the decisions live in a Translation Memory and a terminology list rather than in one person’s head. That is also what makes the output checkable: a reviewer can ask whether the copy matches the agreed voice, which is a usable question, instead of whether it matches the English, which is not.

How the work runs

A supplier that can name its steps can tell you which one you are in. Ours runs in six:

1. Understand the Project Brief. The content, the markets, the purpose and the constraints.
2. Pre-Transcreation Study. Reviewing brand materials, style and tone, and uncovering the market-specific technical jargon and colloquial terms the content will need.
3. Transcreation. The writing, drawing on the Translation Memory built for your brand.
4. Client Review. Your own market teams read the content before it is live.
5. Update and Approval. Revisions, then sign-off.
6. Final Delivery. Into the system it has to live in, or as artwork ready to print.

Client Review is where the craft is tested. The brand’s own market teams are the only people who can say whether the copy sounds like the brand in their language, and they should see it before it is published rather than after. How to run that loop well is in collaborating with your transcreation partner; what to look for is in how to check translation quality before it goes live.

What we can evidence

Engagements where the writing had to carry brand voice across many languages at once.

• For Frasers Hospitality we relaunched the website in 15 languages, including Chinese, Japanese, Arabic and German — over half a million words in eight weeks, integrated into the client’s Adobe Experience Manager system, alongside CRM content, sales brochures and fact sheets.
• For COMO Hotels & Resorts we localised website content into 7 languages — Arabic, Simplified Chinese, Japanese, French, German, Russian and Spanish — publishing into the Drupal back end alongside the client’s digital agency, and extended the programme to CRM content, in-room directories, spa and F&B menus and press releases.
• For Millennium Hotels & Resorts we are an appointed language service provider, producing brand content for China, Taiwan, Japan, the UAE, Spain, Italy and France on Sitecore, with quality assurance before go-live.
• For The Gap Partnership we localised negotiation-training courseware for C-suite audiences into 3 languages — Simplified Chinese, Japanese and Korean — building bilingual glossaries into the Translation Memory.

The Gap Partnership engagement is the clearest illustration of bounded latitude: negotiation-training courseware for C-suite audiences in Simplified Chinese, Japanese and Korean, where the terminology had to be identical across a large body of material. We built bilingual glossaries into the Translation Memory so that the vocabulary was decided once and then held.

Asked why they chose us, our clients rank it as quality, turnaround time and service, in that order. Asked why they stay, they cite the quality, our understanding of their audience and their brand, turnaround, the cost savings a Translation Memory produces over time, and familiarity with their internal processes. Clients often arrive having experienced badly translated content — copy that was more direct than creative.

At IPPWORLD, we are an award-winning transcreation agency that specialises in creative translation and marketing localisation for the hospitality, travel, lifestyle and retail sectors. The award is Best Hospitality Creative Translation & Localisation Agency 2019, at the LUXlife Hospitality Awards. We have worked in this field since 1994, from Singapore, with an editorial team in Shanghai, and we work in 30 languages — 18 Asian, 10 European and 2 Middle Eastern.

Conclusion

The craft of transcreation is making the same argument twice, to two audiences, using whatever each one responds to. It looks like creative freedom and it is actually a narrow discipline: the intent is fixed, the facts are fixed, the terminology is fixed, and the only thing the writer may change is how the point is made.

That constraint is the reason it works, and the reason it can be reviewed. Copy produced this way can be judged against something, which is more than can be said for copy judged against a source text it was never supposed to resemble.

Frequently Asked Questions

Send us a page you are unhappy with in one of your languages and we will tell you whether the problem is accuracy or register. More on the craft is on our transcreation page, the category on marketing translation, and the process on How We Work. Related reading: the mistakes that make translated content feel unnatural, keeping one brand voice across every language, transcreation in hotels and hospitality and avoiding cultural blunders.