Evolution of Transcreation in Digital Marketing
When businesses look to globalize and publish digital content to reach local audiences, a common stumbling block is the simple confusion between direct translation and transcreation. Although they may sound similar they are very different and can ultimately make an impact on the success of your brand or product in your desired target country.
Transcreation is not just a term used by advertising and marketing professionals, it is an important part of the overall globalization and localization program. Transcreation is the process of adapting a message from one language to another, while maintaining its intent, style, tone and context. Think cultural adaptation.
A successfully transcreated message evokes the same emotions and carries the same implications in the target language as it does in the source language. Increasingly, transcreation is more commonly used in global marketing and advertising campaigns as advertisers seek to transcend the boundaries of culture and language. It also takes account of images and multimedia used within a marketing message, ensuring that they are culturally adapted to properly engage the target audience.
The growth and development of transcreation in content marketing has helped many companies to grow expand geographies, open new markets and carry on conversations in new languages. However, as the world becomes more connected and technologies continue to grow, the transcreation process has to adapt to meet the many changing digital touch points of a consumer’s buying journey. The growth of technology and smart devices has spurred the growth of mobile marketing. Mobile marketing encompasses paid advertisements on apps, making their ads, promotions and videos on formats suitable for mobile and tablet devices via Internet browsing, social media and emails.
A large growth area for transcreation is within mobile app localization. According to a report by Statista Apple’s app store is growing by over 1,000 apps a day and there are over 1.5 million apps on the iOS app store already. The growth at which the app market has grown and is maturing makes it harder apps to be visible among millions of global online shoppers. To ensure your app will be found and downloaded globally, app store localization is becoming a crucial part of app store optimization.
With the uniqueness of app localization and continuous adaptations and updates to meet changing requirements and algorithms, localization of apps are predominantly carried out using a transcreation approach. Mobile apps have low content volumes and minimalist UI’s so they require a high level of transcreation and are not suited for MT or straight translation. Mobile app localization encompasses transcreation of the app store description page, app title and keywords for SEO purposes.
The Common Sense Advisory published a report in January 2016 titled “Mobile App Localization,” which stated that “companies are increasingly offering more choice in terms of languages and dialects for their mobile apps, recognizing the personalization and uniqueness that smart devices offer individual users.”
If you don’t localize your digital content for your target market, whether it’s social media, banner advertisement or mobile apps, it may be automatically translated by Google when viewed from a foreign IP address. This translation may turn out to be completely inaccurate and have the exact opposite results by losing your global audience and consumer.
