Transcreation

The difference between translation and transcreation can range from a fine, almost invisible line, to a rather wide gap. To put it simply, if translation is “the replacing of words in one language with corresponding words in another language”, while transcreation “makes use of creativity and cultural knowledge to ensure the content will resonate with a specific audience that speaks a different language”, I can safely say that no translation is ever readable without making use of at least a tiny spark of transcreation.

However, the two grow increasinly further apart when the field of application is purely commercial: if I design an advertising campaign for a home improvement retailer around the saying “good fences make good neighbours”, I will likely use a garden with a beautiful fence and happy neighbours in my visuals, and I will use the phrase throughout the campaign. If, however, the retailer wants to use the same campaign in a different country where that saying does not exist, or where a similar concept is expressed through a different metaphor, there can be no effective translation: in an ideal world (one I’m yet to witness), the project is appropriately identified to require transcreation, and the transcreator (team? I’m allowed to dream) develops an appropriate concept starting from a creative brief, and will create material that will effectively target the same intended audience and deliver the message in the same tone and in the same spirit, as different as the two messages may appear on paper.

When the material to be translated is technical (be it legal, medical, or otherwise), transcreation, of course, has little or no space.

The two come closest in editorial translation, where the one is always trying to reign the other in: too much transcreation and you’re writing a different novel altogether, too much “literal” translation and you’re producing a text that’s so foreign-sounding it’s actually unreadable. Think of the many Russian classics where you’ve had to navigate between names and diminutives, where Levin becomes Kostya (diminutive of Konstantin) and Vronsky becomes Alyosha (diminutive of Alexei): while reading a perfectly smooth English rendition of Dostoevksy’s words, these names suddenly remind you we’re in Russia: this “foreignness” magically force you to travel to snowy steppes and winter palaces; think of what would have happened if the translator had turned Levin into, I don’t know, Lewis, and Vronsky into Val. In other words, a level of foreignness needs to be preserved, because one of the purposes of the text is to virtually transport readers to a different place - be it a time in the past, an imaginary land of legends and magic, or a distant and exotic land. A Russian novel should transport us to Russia: this doesn’t mean that the language should sound “translated”, because if it did, the reader would be too distracted by the form to access the content. But if a Russian soldier from a provincial region started talking with a Texan or a Glaswegian accent, the reader would no longer inhabit that different place where the story takes place - and the story itself should lose its realism. In other words, a good translator has the ability to discern between what needs to remain “literal” and what needs a touch of creativity, to best serve the purpose of the text.