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“We don’t need a copywriter: we had one of those for the English content; we just need it translated”, “How can these taglines cost more than the rest of the content? It’s only a few words.”
These are frequent conversations we have with our customers who want their marketing material to be translated into foreign languages. On the whole, the localisation industry does base its costs on a ‘per word’ rate, because this tells us how long a linguist will take to complete the work set. However, this does not take into account whether the words that need translating are part of a slogan or a tagline, if the text contains a lot of culturally-specific terms, or even idioms that make little sense if translated word for word into another language? There are contributing factors other than word-counts that decide the cost of a project, and this is why we see small sized projects with higher rates.
Double-meanings or cultural references often don’t apply in the target language.
The type of translation required in these instances (termed Transcreation within the industry) asks the linguist to be a lot more creative with their work; they cannot remain as loyal to the source as they would if they were translating a similar number of words in an instruction manual for example – it’s not about ‘accuracy’ so much here as it is about creativity and flair.
Think about the following slogans and how a linguist translating these would deal with not just the face value of the messages, but maintain the imagery and brand association as well;
- Johnnie Walker’s “If you want to impress someone, put him on your Black list”
- Nintendo 64’s “Get N or get out”
- Esso’s “Put a tiger in your tank”
- Guinness’ “My goodness, my Guinness!”
- John Deere’s “Nothing runs like a Deere”
The methods involved in the transferral of each slogan over to another language are significantly more labour intensive than for the same number of words taken from a technical manual, for example. It may have taken an advertising agency a large number of man hours to come up with “Nothing runs like a Deere”, but the expectation is that a translation agency can create the equivalent in 10 languages in under a day, because the hard work has already been done. Unfortunately this slogan isn’t going to work well if directly translated into other languages where the word for “deer” isn’t similar to the brand name. It’s important to make our customers aware that the more creativity went into the original, the more creativity it will take to make it work in other languages.
Foreign copy should never sound like foreign copy to those who are reading it.
The linguists working on these types of projects really have to go back to the drawing board to explore the sub-text and thought processes involved when reading the slogan. Once identified, if the same double-meanings or cultural references don’t apply in the target language (and in most cases they don’t), they will need to develop new ones, and this can take far longer than the translation of technical instructions or legal documents.
Remember that foreign copy should never sound like foreign copy to those who are reading it. The best marketing messages sound like they have been created specifically for the audience in question, and it is these clever slogans that will often help your products and services to sell. Transcreation may indeed cost that bit more, but when you’ve put so much hard work into creating a phenomenal campaign in English, you surely want the same results overseas?
