(…) unless your headline sells your product, you have wasted 90 percent of your money.

Finally, your marketing campaign for that new product or service is ready. You and your team worked so hard to ensure the content you created attracts and retains customers in your country. Now you want to achieve the same effect in Poland, and this is where I come in. With my thorough knowledge of the Polish language and culture, I can guarantee you peace of mind that your message will be conveyed to Polish customers so that they will want to buy your products.

Marketing translation involves adapting your content in such a way that it affects the target audience in the same way as the original.

Transcreation

Words, when well chosen, have so great a force in them that a description often gives us more lively ideas than the sight of things themselves

The aim of transcreation, often called creative translation, is to produce copy in another language that has the same effect on the target audience as the original. It often involves some changes in content as far as linguistic and cultural differences are concerned, in order for the target text to elicit the same reaction as the original in a different country. The changes can involve style, tone and rhetorical figures, or even the whole sentence structure. For example, when German brand Haribo decided to introduce their products to the British market, they had to change the whole tagline to sound as catchy in English as it sounds in German. It was obvious that rhyme was the key to success, so the German tagline “Haribo macht Kinder froh, und Erwachsene ebenso” was transcreated into “Kids and grown-ups love it so, the happy world of Haribo”.

Localisation

Translation is not a matter of words only: it is a matter of making intelligible a whole culture.

Localisation means adapting content to a particular country and its culture, meaning that the target text has to correspond to local customs and norms to be clear and fully understandable to the target group. For example, when Starbucks introduced their 'Gingerbread Latte' in the German market, they were surprised that it was not selling well. Although gingerbread is one of Germany’s most favourite cakes at Christmas, the Latte was not as popular as expected, since the English term 'gingerbread' was totally unknown to German customers and therefore not understandable. The following winter, the brand began selling the 'Lebkuchen Latte' and sales finally flourished.

Theme translation

My task, which I am trying to achieve is, by the power of the written word, to make you hear, to make you feel--it is, before all, to make you see.

Theme translation is a term coined by me to describe the procedures used in creative translation that aim at describing a product by using words and phrases associated with this product, its name, its features, etc. in order to make it more attractive to target customers. For example, a text about nautical interior design will include imagery associated with the sea, such as sunny beaches, holiday escapes, picturesque harbours, cruises, the climate of a fisherman’s shack, etc., even when it is necessary to change the original content.