Global Transcreation Blog

Good question. While the two words are not quite a full-blown oxymoron, there is an element of conflict if not contradiction. Can or should Adwords be translated or is there a better way?

Search marketing is big and commands big spend in companies large and small with the demand for search analysts reaching the levels that html programmers achieved in the 90s. While the US market clearly leads the global field in terms of the adoption and sophistication of search marketing techniques, international brands are hungry to generate similar improvements in lead-generation and conversion across all their major markets, particularly the growing or more resilient ones.

While multilingual search engine optimization requires thought, structure and time, paid search does offer the promise of more instant gratification in terms of click-throughs and potential conversions.

“You pays your money and makes your choice.”

Need Adwords for your international lead generation campaigns? Easy. Follow our simple 4-step process to international success:

• Step 1 Grab those ad groups and campaigns that worked in the US
• Step 2 Download them into a spreadsheet from Google Adwords and send them for translation
• Step 3 Load them back into Google Adwords, build local campaigns
• Step 4 Ante-up the PPC bids until the ads are prominent in the “Sponsored links”.

Right? Not really. You just reduced the probability of success by a factor of ten!

If you know anything about Adwords you will be aware that they are made up of a list of trigger keywords, three fixed length lines of copy and two URLs. All of which have a specific role to play. Every component needs to be localized to suit the target local market, including the destination landing page.

Starting to have doubts about my “Simple, easy 4-step process?” If not, you should be. Have a look at the following sentence – lots of words all of them familiar but what does it mean?

Prices houses and cottages, Cottages and houses – Reviews and Prices, Forecasts cottage market

Here it is in its original and hopefully more recognizable form:

Russian:

Цены на дома и коттеджи

Коттеджи и дома – обзоры и цены
Прогнозы коттеджного рынка

English:

Prices houses and cottages
Cottages and houses – Reviews and Prices
Forecasts cottage market

What is interesting here is that the Russian search phrase used was “дом в финляндии” or “House in Finland” and we also tried “Property and Finland” (недвижимость в финляндии) but guess what is the most common search term for Russians looking for a house in Finland?

коттеджи в финляндии (Cottages in Finland)

Yes, ‘Cottages’, not house or property or even dacha, but ‘cottages in Finland’. Notice that whoever created this Adword knew that and made sure that house and cottage where not only in the Ad but also trigger keywords.

From this you can see how important it is to do proper local keyword research as part of your ‘Adword Translation’ process or you are going to both miss out on relevant searches and score a low Google quality rating. Which will either force your bid price higher or drop you down the sponsor list.

The moral of this post? Don’t just translate your Adwords; go to a competent International Search Marketing Agency or, better still, come to Wordbank, where we understand search and marketing and get your Adwords properly localized for the target market. Otherwise it is just more expensive mud on an ever bigger wall.

The GALA conference plenary session on 11 May started with an MT bang and ended with a donkey wallop!  Entitled “The Risks and Rewards of Machine Translation”, the subject matter was always going to delight and irritate in equal measure – strong emotions were stirred.  Dion Wiggins of Asia Online, taking full advantage of his significant stage presence,  launched into an energetic justification of MT as the natural pinnacle of the Darwinian evolution of translation.

Dion suggested, as you might expect, that the MT spinning jenny, rather than putting the skilled weavers of translation out of a job, would create a whole new, expanding industry surrounding the core commodity of MT.

Fear not, brave toilers of words, you will emerge butterfly-like from the cocoon of MT into a bright new world of opportunity!

My thanks to Jiri Stejskal who, on behalf of the ATC, crossed swords with Bob Donaldson to present the other side of the debate.  However,  I was concerned that far too much respect was being given to the latest manifestation of silicon intelligence.  It was time to strike back for Luddites everywhere.

What more resounding clarion call to the people can there be than that of  “Beware, comrades, of the capitalist recidivist bearing gifts.” No less an oracle than SDL’s blog reported my performance such: “His address to the audience as ‘Comrades!’ encouraged us all to sit up and listen“.

Like all great hypotheses mine was simple and was simply put, as you can see from the following images.

1. In case you are in any doubt, machine translation means translated by a machine for humans to read. In most cases machine means a software application with a huge database and lots and lots of rules.

2. However, once it has been translated it has to be processed by skilled humans before your average human can both read and make sense of it. These processing humans, typically translators, carry out what is called post-editing, where post-editing is a euphemism for clearing up the mess left by slightly incompetent machines. Repetitive, boring, not fun – a donkey job, in other words

Post Scriptum Asinus - The MT Donkey

3. The result is that content for translation must first be valued before selecting the best or most affordable route for translation. Two forces thus emerge: on one side, the corporate hunger for cost efficiency eagerly diverting the maximum content down the cheapest route while on the other, the natural aversion of skilled workers for boring, repetitive tasks creating a new segmentation of translation resource.

Fact or Fiction?

Despite my antagonistic approach for the benefit of the early morning crowd in Prague, I am not anti-MT.  It is clear that after 50 years in the making, technology has now evolved to a stage where MT is starting to offer serious benefits for high volume, low value content translation.

As Dion will tell you: caveat emptor – it comes at a cost, a high investment.  If anything, Google can take much of the recognition  for increasing awareness of MT and improving its respectability.  But it does also make the case for both the transcreator and faithful translator for high value content, which continues to expand exponentially across the net.

One final thought regarding web content:  “Just because we have the means to post it and translate it does not mean we should or that if we do anyone will ever read it.”

But then that’s another story…

I recently participated in an extensive Transcreation survey being run by Common Sense Advisory of Lowell, Mass. in the US and I am reliably informed that their report is due out end of this month (March).
While I am honoured to have been included that’s not the news. What is interesting is that Transcreation is becoming a serious topic (but hopefully not without its humorous side) outside of the world of  international advertising.  Major international companies,  Ad. Agencies and a variety of Language Service Providers have all been consulted – so we can expect a broad church of views
I will be very interested to see what CSA conclude and you can guarantee that some debate will ensue.

Particularly as I note a large number of other translation vendors that suddenly have something to say about ‘transcreation’ on their websites. It’s fine jumping on the bandwagon but the question is can you hold the tune?

Transcreation - a Trojan Horse for centralization?

Is transcreation just a Trojan horse used by Global VPs of Marketing to wrest global campaign production responsibility away from the countries where they will be executed?

I guess the answer depends on how paranoid you are or how dictatorial your VP of Marketing is. My own view is that in the present competitive, budget constrained environment, both transcreation and centralization have individual merit when considering the best approach to global marketing campaign production and execution.

First and foremost transcreation requires an intimate knowledge of a local market and constant exposure to the local media. Many Belgians, Canadians and Swiss speak ‘French’, although any Parisian would happily debate this over a Ricard (Pastis) or two. However, the TV, Newspapers and culture in Brussels, Quebec, Lyons and Lausanne vary considerably.

QED: any creative translators participating in the transcreation process should reside in their native country.

Anyone for Pastis?

There has been a significant trend towards centralization of production of global marketing campaigns. Cost, time-to-market and control of messaging are all reasons regularly cited by clients I meet. My experience tells me that the management culture and organizational structure of the individual large international corporation does play a large part in this decision too.

It is not surprising that where a company has a strong directive, command and control approach to management and the brand the more likely it is to be heavily centralized. I am sure several brands spring immediately to mind?

What can be centralized? Well pretty much everything. What should be centralized? That will depend on several factors of which budget, time-to-market and availability of local resources are but three.

I regularly see the following aspects of global campaigns centralized:

• Creative and copywriting
• Production and resizing
• Media planning and purchase
• Supply chain management
• Transcreation management (but not the transcreation activity)
• SEO
• CRM

As a rough rule of thumb: if you operate in a few countries and have a few products then you can deliver quite happily without going down the centralization route. Most marketing activities can be done for each country, by each country, based on central guidelines. The opposite is obviously true where you operate in 20 plus countries and have several products and continuous campaigns.

The tricky part is moving from one approach to the other!  As for centralized transcreation activity – which is championed by the few – I would, like the cliché, avoid it like the plague. But then again I have never been a big fan of the committee approach to transcreation.

Over 2 days last week some 9,392 digital marketers jammed themselves into Technology For Marketing & Advertising (TFM&A) in London’s West End. In line with modern event style exhibitors and presentation theaters shared the extensive exhibition space. This approach works well and generates a constant stream of traffic around the exhibitions. Plus it is fair to say that few people are prepared to slog around an event that is simply a vendor-fest – they are expect much more.

Reflecting the prevailing trends the presentations were, in the main, focused on SEO, Social Media, CRM and email marketing. Inevitably there were a few presentations that should have been labeled – “Government Heath warning- Blatant Sales Pitch”.

However, for anyone keen to keep up to date with best practices in UK-centred digital marketing I can recommend Dr Dave Chaffey’s blog . His well paced presentation was standing room only.

It will come as no surprise that the emphasis of the Wordbank stand was on ‘Transcreation’. Happily I can report that I was asked by several visitors, “Exactly what is transcreation?” (Result no.1) . More importantly, many more tentatively pronounced a need for transcreation (Result No. 2) and wanted to know if it was the solution that they were looking for.

You may be surprised to hear that my response was “not necessarily”. While vast sums may be expended on creating that punchy, award winning tag line or slogan the value placed on online content tends to decrease exponentially with the volume required or being produced.

At the top of the scale are banner or online display ads, followed by page and section titles with technical facts and stats often ending up at the bottom. Personally, I would place keywords high up the value scale due to their ability to attract, or not, web traffic via Search. However, on the basis of much of the global web content out there, I am sure this is not yet a majority held view.

In order to help decide where and when to apply transcreation I have created this simple diagram.

Wordbank Transcreation Model

This provides a rough guide based on content type. In practice any decision will be based upon your own view of the value or criticality of the content, in terms of meeting the communications objectives, and of course the generosity of the budget that you have been blessed with.

Ultimately, if you have the time and the money or the motivation then in-country copywriters should give the most important content the attention it deserves and be able to pander to the particular needs of your local marketers, resellers or agents. As ever caveat emptor.

Transcreation – what is it?

Well it will neither offer salvation to the planet nor the sinner.  If you are an international marketer,  working on global advertising or brand development or in the localization business you may have come across the term before.

Here are a few random definitions from around the ‘net:

“…a packet of services aimed at those operating in the advertising sector, including translation, localisation and copy editing services.”

“…is a form of translation, closer to copywriting, resulting in a text linguistically and culturally adapted for its intended audience. Transcreated material is supposed to have the same impact on the target audience as the original source text.”

“… a bundle of services designed for clients operating in the advertising sector. It consists of the complete set of translation, localization and copyediting services. Transcreation is a more complex service as it involves the creativity and discipline of professionals whose core activity is content adaptation.”

Clearer now or not?  I do have a definition of my own to offer but first let’s look at an example.  If you click on my first post the “Happy Birthday” one you will see a great VW ad. The strap line (punchline) reads:

“In advertising, you’re allowed to exaggerate. (that explains the caravan)”

To a British audience what it really says, now take a deep breath, is..

——————————————————————————————————————

“We, VW, are so cool we can take the p*ss in our ads.  Hey, our  ad agency is real cool too.  Yes, we agree anyone that insists on towing a caravan (US: Trailer) is an annoying Muppet and should be banned from all roads, lanes, motorways and streets between the hours of  6:00 am and midnight and is definitely uncool.  However, not if you are driving a VW ‘cos we, at VW,  are cool and look so cool and manly that our 4×4 can tow a jumbo – how cool is that?”

——————————————————————————————————————

A US translation could be: “In advertising everyone exaggerates. (that explains the trailer)”

But does it go any way towards encapsulating the same message as the UK English – maybe you can tell me?

Talking?

Messaging and advertising, are by definition developed,  in a specific cultural environment, carrying their own latent sub-text,blah, blah blah…

Long story, short: if you want to run this across the main EU countries, time and budget will largely dictate your approach. Accurate but straight translation offers a cheap but workmanlike solution while using the Ad. Agency network multiplied by 13 or 26 languages provides a culturally attuned but lengthy and expensive solution.

Hence combine and cross-fertilise the two to get a creative translation more effective than translation and quicker and more economical than the agency network.

Eureka – Transcreation!

Finally, as promised,  here is how we at Wordbank define it:

Wordbank transcreation services adapt rather than translate your marketing and advertising ensuring that, by staying true to the original and reflecting local culture, you achieve maximum impact in each market

Cheesy smile no.1

WARNING – Under Construction

I will soon be up and running once I get the hang of Wordpress. On the basis I still have sufficient gray matter to achieve this end before Hades freezes over.

The aim is basically what it says on the label – topics, news and points of contention regarding the sometimes tricky, often alarming and frequently funny world of transcreation, adaptation and translation of  marketing messaging across all media.

I promise unashamedly to introduce historical references, trivia, quotations – real and imagined, constructive opinions, anecdotal digressions and the occasional movie review. I would also hope that the production quality will improve progressively as I rise to a Wordpress conscious competent .

I am looking forward to your comments, contributions and (inevitable) spam – when and if this isolated spiral of the world wide web is discovered.

I leave you with this great ad. to ponder….

Spot the cultural and linguistic challenges - answers in the next post!