Localizing Marketing campaigns and selling across cultures: The thin line between Marketing translation and transcreation
Nowadays, most international companies are well-aware of the importance of launching effective marketing campaigns abroad. Even though the great majority of them don’t rely on International Marketing experts only, some of them still ignore the benefits of hiring professional translators in addition to their team of experts in order to localize their international marketing campaign.
And this fact may pose a problem in the near future, since even though the effectiveness of an international marketing campaign depend on many factors that only qualified experts are able to deal with, some of the most important factors for an international campaign in order to be truly effective are related to cultural aspects and differences that should definitely be taken into account for the sake of their success.
While there are experts that are qualified to deal with many of the factors involved in a marketing campaign, specialized translators are the right professionals to be in charge of the cultural elements, since they have the necessary cultural and linguistic knowledge to localize a marketing campaign into different cultures.
Maybe some companies would not think this necessary unless the target culture is extremely opposed to their own or they would think that the same marketing strategies that worked within their national borders, will work abroad as well, but the actual fact is that the most effectively localized marketing campaigns keep the slightest cultural differences in mind, no matter whether the target culture belongs to a different country or even to different regions within the same country.
One example of a successfully localized marketing campaign is the case of Unilever, whose Heartbrand will be familiar to most of us and not all of us will probably know this brand by the same name. Apart from translating their campaign into several languages, this company created different brands for the same products depending on the target country, and the most remarkable fact is that, even in many countries with really similar cultures, like Spain and Portugal, or countries sharing a common tongue, as for instance, Germany and Austria or Spain, Venezuela, Ecuador and Argentina; this company used brands with totally different names according to the effect that these names have on their audience(here you will find a detailed list of the names that Heartbrand used for each country).
That is why, even though Marketing is a field that does not require knowing a bunch of unintelligible specialized terms, like in the case of texts related to Law and Economics, it is considered a specialized field and, as such, expert translators should be dealing with these sort of texts in order to ensure an appropriate localization to the target culture. Here I’ll display a few facts that expert marketing translators should bear in mind while facing this arduous challenge:
Even though texts are provided with the best quality, literal translation might not always work
At this point, one thing must be completely clear: an effectively localized marketing campaign translates into a larger number of international sales. There is a great diversity of elements that could lead to sales, since there are a lot of variables going on and it will always depend of the kind of product that is being sold. However, one of the patterns that is repeatedly used in marketing-related texts is what I call “model cultures”, i.e. a way of trying to convince the customer to purchase the product because of a certain feature that belongs to another culture, building up a positive image of the product.
We can observe many examples of this strategy in everyday commercials and advertisements, such as the well-known “German quality”, used almost everywhere but specially in European countries, or “Korean style”, used widely in Asian countries with regard to fashion products mostly.
As translators, we must know whether these cultural model references could be effective in a marketing campaign for our target audience or not. For example, it would not make sense to leave a reference to “Korean style” for a European audience, since it would not be understood the same way as the Asian audience does (or even not at all). Therefore, some possible options to sort out this cultural obstacle might be localizing this comparison to some other culture renowned by this same feature or, as in many other cases in Marketing translation, use transcreation and just let our creativity flow.
Transcreation means just a process in which a text is translated, while recreates the original text in a new context, making sure that it is still appropriate for the intended context and audience. Reading this, you might think that transcreation and Translation are basically the same and the truth is that the line between them is very thin, but putting it into other words, transcreation leaves room for more creativity, while Translation should be closer to the original text.
Therefore, in case you are translating marketing-related texts with tricky cultural references that won’t work for sure in the target audience and you want to blow customers’ minds, being creative could be your best ally!
Another element that could make literal translation utterly inappropriate for marketing texts is the writing style. Apart from the fact that writing style in marketing-related texts depends mainly on the kind of product (let’s admit it, selling Ferraris cannot be compared to selling plastic houseware products), different cultures may use different writing styles for the same product.
For example, in Chinese advertisements, it would not be too odd to see marketing texts written like ancient poems (even for daily, unsophisticated products), while that would be completely unusual from the European perspective. In my opinion, an adaptation of the style might be a good approach in these cases, but we should not get carried away by this strategy, since in some other products –more “exotic” ones, like for example, rice cookers-, keeping the same style would be an interesting and probably more appropriate strategy. After all, it would always depend on the product and the target audience that we are translating for.
The power of visual impact. Should punctuation marks be sacrificed?
Finally, it is also important to highlight the visual impact that punctuation marks and grammatical mistakes may leave on the target audience. Visual impact may have a really powerful effect in marketing-related texts and we are aware that punctuation marks sometimes may not fit visually in an advertisement.
But the truth is that punctuation marks should not be left behind and advertisements with grammatical errors are always more laughable than effective. You may see a couple of examples of how these mistakes could ruin some of the most expensive marketing campaigns.
In my opinion, there are many ways to prevent this sort of mistakes. Translators must ensure the highest quality of their texts while trying to preserve the original selling purpose. A very valid solution that I would suggest in case we face this situation would be reformulating the whole structure of the sentence, so it could be effective according to the original purpose and grammatically correct, but, of course, there are many other solutions that translators could use. In the end, we would have to find the perfect balance between correctness and effectiveness in order to find the right solution.
As you may see, Marketing Translation is a world full of different options and strategies, and these are just a few examples. In sum, every option is valid as long as it has a positive effect on the target audience and translates into a positive outcome for the company. Since there are not good and bad strategies by default, choose and craft your own style freely, as long as it works. After all, it’s all about selling.
Curious how quality translations could help your organization reach new international customers? Get an instant quote at Lingfy.com or drop us a line at hi@lingfy.com
