Translations aren’t a one-way street
If you are a buyer of translations, and want those translations to be the best fit for your purposes, there is one thing in particular that you should be aware of: Translations aren’t a one-way street.
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Dare to condense
In this blog series, I am planning to post a variety of transcreative techniques over time. This is one of them. I call it:
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Das Asterix-Prinzip
Falls Sie als Profi den Asterix-Effekt noch nicht kennen: Keine Bange, das ist keine Wissenslücke. Ich habe die Bezeichnung erfunden, weil sie mir so anschaulich erscheint und eine perfekte Ergänzung meiner Ausführungen zur Bild-Text-Kongruenz in meinem Buch darstellt.
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How can I quickly turn a translation into a transcreation?
What can you do when you have a marketing text translated and then realize, upon seeing the translation, that the target text is not at all what you expected?
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Why should sales and promotional material be handled by transcreators instead of regular translators?
Problems arise when clients request – and pay for – a translation but actually expect something that a copywriter would have written. That’s where transcreators come in.
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I am bilingual and have taken courses in creative writing. Does that qualify me as a transcreator?
A transcreator needs deep expertise in translation and deep expertise in strategic copywriting. Expertise in both of these fields is indispensable.
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Why use the term transcreation rather than marketing translation?
Labeling something a marketing translation when you mean transcreation can be highly misleading.
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“Marketing texts are easy to translate, right?”
Every translator can be trusted to translate business-critical marketing texts, right? After all, these are texts that (by their very nature) are easy to understand (mostly, that is). So, how hard can it be to just take those words and translate them into another language? The truth is: It is tricky. There is a lot that can go wrong.
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Artificial intelligence is changing the language-services landscape, no doubt
We should embrace neural machine translation as a historic opportunity to re-instate visibility for the expertise and added value that human translators and transcreators offer their clients. It is up to all of us to make intelligent use of that opportunity, with support from strong and active professional associations around the world.
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Is current academic teaching aligned with real-world challenges?
Over the years, I have been approached by academics telling me that what I present as transcreation is really nothing else than what they teach as translation. What they do is basically tack the translation label onto any type of work that in some way includes a source and a target-language text. Which, in my experience, is not a good idea. “Why? What’s the problem?” you ask.
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