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Transcreation: Adapating your Brand Message Across Cultures

Posted by Deepan Patel
January 10th, 2012

24781 300x270 Transcreation: Adapating your Brand Message Across Cultures Here’s the scenario: A leading Web security provider is getting ready to launch a marketing campaign across nine languages in the EMEA region. They provide products to more than 15,000 customers worldwide, including 88% of the Fortune® Global 500 and want to promote their new WAN (wide area network) optimization solutions.

This is the position which Blue Coat Systems found themselves in, as they were preparing to launch their multilingual WAN optimization marketing offensive. Central to this campaign were two taglines: “Free the WAN” and “Make it Blue”. These taglines would form the foundation upon which all accompanying collateral and white papers would be conceptualized and built.

The idea behind “Free the WAN” is a clear allusion to freedom; the freedom from network congestion that Blue Coat solutions bring, thereby making the network “free” to deliver the content you need. Blue Coat developed a solution to reduce traffic demands on Wide Area Networks by removing redundant components, and compressing a large amount of data to make the whole process that much more efficient. In this way Blue Coat can be said to have set your WAN free. The second tagline: “Make it Blue” highlights the Blue Coat brand name and color, which is further consolidated by the visuals accompanying the text of graffiti cans spraying the taglines for this campaign.

So far a seemingly sound and well-conceived campaign, but only for English language speakers. Blue Coat recognized that a literal translation of these taglines into the nine target languages would not be effective, for a direct translation would not allude to the elements of wordplay and metaphor, and thus lose their impact for the new target audiences. What they required was a complete re-write of the taglines to both mirror the communication objectives of the English original and make the statements relevant for the local target audiences. In other words, they required a transcreation service.

Transcreation is particularly suited for tagline text and requires a talented pool of bilingual copy-writers who ensure that campaign-critical messages are rendered consistently across languages whilst remaining sensitive to local requirements. Milengo offered Blue Coat a comprehensive transcreation solution tailored to their plan for the campaign. Once Blue Coat and Milengo had drawn up a joint creative brief, we set up a team of experienced marketing copy-writers who were asked to perform the following:

Provide three alternative transcreations for each of the two taglines, along with a literal back translation in English.
Provide a cultural commentary for each option. This commentary would include the reasons for the choice of translation, the associations for the target market, use of literary devices such as humor, imagery, alliteration, metaphors and similes etc. In other words, just the kinds of work linguists enjoy.
The three options would include:
- One option that is very close to the original English.
- Another that represents a creative leap
- A third option as a middle ground of sorts.
Copy-writers were asked to indicate their preferred option with a justification as to why.

After these taglines had been transcreated into the nine EMEA languages, Milengo coordinated closely with Blue Coat’s in-country language reviewers to decide which taglines should be used for each language. Once this was completed, the rest of the translations for the accompanying marketing collateral were literally “a piece of cake”.