TRANSCREATION OR TRANSCULTURAL MARKETING

March 8, 2022
Maria Joaquina Marques

The market increasingly demands greater proximity to the target audience and its culture. This not only promotes a greater connection between product and consumer, but also creates new concepts and bridges between different environments and cultures. In the field of translation, this bridge is established through transcreation or transcultural marketing.

More adapted to advertising and marketing, transcreation is a creative process of transposing and translating a culture and a message. Instead of translating advertising content “to the letter,” transcreation allows the creation of content that is more related to the target audience, its culture, habits, and language. The challenge for the translator is to be more creative and spark the interest of consumers in an original manner. If a company wants to transfer a campaign from the country of origin to one or more different countries, it must choose to carry out a transcription of the content, adapting that campaign to different markets, each with unique styles and habits.

Transcultural marketing, on the other hand, takes into consideration the diverse cultures that may co-exist in a given country. We can see in large urban centres the combination of different social identities and each one of them is taken into consideration in the strategies and methods used by transcultural marketing. The main goal is to create a value proposition and a close relationship with the consumer in the long run, capturing the essence of each identity, be it cultural, ethnic, gender or age.

Both transcreation and transcultural marketing require greater creativity and teamwork between translators and marketeers, since the two play an essential role in adapting a product or a brand to a specific culture. It is up to them to combine efforts to create the desired connection to the end consumer.