Okay, quiz time, and no fair Googling the answer. The process of “transcreation” describes:

a. How Optimus Prime was born.

b. Something involving the Catholic Church and Holy Communion.

c. How RuPaul goes from wearing men’s clothes to wearing a dress, wig, and makeup.

d. A process by which marketing concepts from a source language are recreated in a target language.

Alright, so no one said that the quiz was necessarily going to be challenging. But transcreation is a process that is becoming increasingly valuable to any company who wants to expand their reach globally.

No, no, no…we said “transcreation”!

Transcreation, Not Translation

Speaking of Googling things, you can find numerous stories about how certain ad campaigns were spectacular failures because the verbatim translation was less than appealing to the target country. There are stories about soft drink companies who exhorted people to come alive with their product, with the translation saying that the drink would raise your ancestors from the dead. Then there was the car whose name, when translated, supposedly meant “doesn’t go”.

While many of these stories are actually just urban legends (Fictional stories on the Internet? Who knew?), they do underscore an important point. A direct translation of marketing copy into another language often times results in the loss of nuance, intent, creativity, and actually the whole point in general. Businesses trying to expand into different national markets don’t need translation, they need transcreation.

Transcreation is a process where professionals who are bilingual and have a marketing background take the original content in the source language and recreate it into a message that delivers the same concepts, flavor, and ideas, but in the target language. These professionals use their knowledge of the local markets in order to re-purpose the content into a form that the target audience will understand and appreciate.

Transcreation is particularly useful for ad copy, taglines, humor, headlines, and slogans.

A New Tool For Effective SEO

There are machine-based translation functions that ostensibly help readers get the gist of text presented in a different language, but these functions are sadly inadequate for the process of , say, translating a marketing promotion in English to a language like Japanese.

When it comes to search engines, it’s important to realize that the world doesn’t necessarily revolve around Google and Yahoo. Sure, they are the heavy-hitters, but there are many other search engines out there, native to countries like South Korea, Russia, and China. Each of these search engines has their own policies and content weighting rules, but they all adhere to the same multilingual SEO translation rules. Unfortunately, sometimes different tools are needed to validate choices, and they can’t always be found in English.

Furthermore, Google sees considers machine-translated content as duplicate content, and will usually de-index said content. Part of the reason for this is that machine-translated content has the same characteristics as auto-generated content, which is a big no-no for Google search results. But if the text is transcreated, it’s original and unique content, and it avoids all of the above pitfalls and shows up better on a search result.

Finally, content that is translated into the language of the local users and made more relevant to them is content that users are more likely to share with friends, which is one of the big reasons for SEO in the first place: more eyeballs, more visits, more hits. Transcreation doesn’t just translate words, it processes the message into a form that uses the local idioms, figures of speech, and general patterns of speech, thereby increasing receptivity.

If you need more benefits, you’ll find them at “9 Ways Transcreation Can Improve Your SEO”.

Reaching Out To The Global Community

If you want to win customers, you have to meet them where they are and speak their language, figuratively and literally. Transcreation services are an integral part in online e-commerce expansion beyond the native borders.

And if you want to some advice that can help out with SEOs in general, which can then be doubtlessly incorporated into a transcreation situation, check out the article “Why SEO And Social Media Work So Well Together”.