As a word combing “translation” and “creation”, transcreation is a complex way of translation to fully reserve the intent, context, emotion, and tone of the source originally conceived by marketing and advertising professionals. The goal is to reproduce the source message thoughtfully and seamlessly, without any trace of translation in the eyes of customers. The finished work should have trigger the identical emotional experience among audiences as the source.

Clients, particularly those in marketing and advertising, sometimes request a translation be “adapted” to a local audience by taking account the local culture. Our investigation showed that the customers with such request needs more than just “translating the words”. They want us to go beyond and ensure the translation has the same emotional impact as the original source – this is exactly what transcreation means: a mix of translation, copywriting and, probably, localization to create a copy in a target language. It is kind of a copywriting in another language, but based on a source text. Some clients might also ask to address non-translation elements like color and images, introducing localization aspect into the transcreation task.

Transcreation requires that the source text has an emotional echo to the reader, meaning that transcreation might not fit to all documents. In this article, we will introduce what makes transcreation different from translation, copywriting and localization.