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You already know the value of making your business content available in multiple languages. On our end, we’ve certainly seen how a coordinated multilingual outreach can lead a company to flourish, and profits to bloom. Yet it’s likely that you’ve also encountered a few minor annoyances on the road. Perhaps you’ve run up against an apparently simple word or phrase that “won’t translate,” or one of your reviewers (you do have reviewers, right?) wants to make changes to translations that are technically correct, but just don’t feel right. Sounds like could use a bit of information on the differences between translation and transcreation. More on that in a bit…
Anyhow, inconveniences like this can be seriously vexing – once you’ve got a professional translation team assembled, and your materials prepared, shouldn’t it be easy to move your stuff from one language to another?
It would be… if moving your stuff from one language to another were really what you were doing. It is what you’re doing when you translate, in a way (we put it that way ourselves all the time), but it may be helpful to reframe your thoughts about translation and transcreation. Try this: you’re not transferring your content, you’re creating new content for a new audience, in a new language, and this new content will mirror your old content as precisely as possible.
What is Transcreation?
As possible is not completely. There is no such thing as a one-to-one translation. Language is too complex in nature for that. Even a translation that’s a 99.5% match against the original will still have that 0.5% of gray area to contend with. That’s when you need transcreation – working around translation roadblocks by going “off book” to create solutions that literal translations won’t provide.
How do you do this? The answer may be as direct as adding a footnote.
Examples of Transcreation in Arabic
In this year’s April/May edition of MultiLingual, Matthew Mermel offers an interesting piece on translation and transcreation for the Arab world. He cites an article in The Economist that contains a striking statistic – though the number of Arabs online multiplied by 30 in the first twelve years of this century, fewer than 1% of websites have Arabic translations. Why? Because in the case of Arabic, language and culture are tightly bound together, and translating into Arabic requires a great deal of attention, sensitivity, and creative thinking… more of these, perhaps, than a business might be willing to put into the translation process.
As an example, Mermel mentions that Arabic does not have an exact translation for “one-parent child”, due to differences between predominant concepts of parenting and family in the English- and Arabic-speaking worlds. The closest equivalent in Arabic is laqit, or “foundling”… which is no equivalent at all. So, an Arabic translator working on an English document about single-parent families would need to insert explanatory notes for readers, to clear up any ambiguity of meaning.
We have some experience of the challenges of Arabic ourselves. In one instance, our translators were unable to offer a translation of a certain term, due to a conflict with religious precepts – Arabic is the language of the Quran, and if something is forbidden by Islam, there may not be a native word for it. In this case, again, an explanatory note solved the problem. More generally, we’ve experienced challenges in translating technical materials into Arabic, for a… well, a commanding reason.
Technical Writing
Technical writing is full of commands. Tighten screws. Adjust valves. Key the following number sequence. Issuing commands, even very mild ones like these, is no problem in European languages. Yet politeness and honorifics are so central to Arabic that giving a terse command like those above can pose a problem. Gramatically, what is an imperative in English (“tighten screws”) will be closer to a subjunctive in Arabic (“may you tighten the screws”). This, too, comes under the heading of transcreation, as your translation team adjusts the tone of your source text to make it acceptable for the target audience. A command in Arabic may read more like an insistent invitation, which is not conducive to brevity. Have you placed your source text within rigidly defined areas, in a table or on a website? Be prepared to relax or change your parameters, to leave room for your translation to expand!
Marketing
Marketing is another realm where transcreation comes to the fore. Marketing text is often brief by necessity, and as you may suspect, there’s an evident link between brevity of source text and a need for creativity in translation.
Remember the “Got Milk?” ad campaign?* Imagine being tasked with translating that phrase into a roster of foreign languages. Only two words, phrased in a colloquial way. The verb “to get”, one of the most over-used and multi-purpose verbs in English, is a devil in translation. It has no subject, a potentially confusing verb, and an object with different connotations in different markets. While some nations are places where milk is something people will happily drink more of, elsewhere the casual question might in general be answered with, “Ick, of course not!” By the way, research shows that Finns drink more milk per capita than anyone else, with the Swedes and the Dutch close behind them.
So, translating that two-word phrase turns out to involve a whole pile of linguistic innovation, cultural knowledge, and market research. Wouldn’t it be easier, and more effective, to transcreate rather than translate? Make translation a part of your marketing scheme from the outset, so you don’t lock yourself into taglines, slogans, or even product names** that will work like a charm at home, but might land with a thud abroad!
Notes
* According to Wikipedia, the “Got Milk?” campaign stayed in North America, though they did translate for the Spanish-language market here. Here’s a short look at how dairy boards in other languages have encouraged people to drink more calcium (white mustaches or no).
** The film-making community may know this better than anyone – it’s always fun to see how your favorite films were retitled for foreign-language markets. How soon were French Canadian viewers able to go back in the water after seeing The Teeth of the Sea? When they watched Sigourney Weaver in The Stranger: The Eighth Passenger, could anyone hear them scream?
Consider a Partnership with TrueLanguage
Are you looking for a partnership with a language service provider? If so, you may wish to consider TrueLanguage. We offer ISO-certified state-of-the-art business translation services that are on budget, on time, and to the exact specification. Every time. Or perhaps you’re just looking for a cost-free, no-obligation estimate for your next translation project. Either way, we’d love to hear from you!
