What is transcreation?
Clients, particularly in a marketing and advertising department, sometimes request that a translation be “adapted” to a local audience so that it takes into account local culture. When we probe, we learn that these requests mean that clients want us to do more than just “translate the words”. They want us to go beyond that and ensure the translation has the same emotional impact as the original source text – this is transcreation. Transcreation is a mix of translation, copywriting and, potentially, localization to create copy in a target language. It is copywriting in another language, but based on a source text. Sometimes, a client will ask to address non-translation elements like color and images, which brings an element of localization into the transcreation task.
