To ensure the success of your international development strategy, your message needs to be tailored to the culture of your target country or countries. Transcreation, or cultural adaptation, is fundamentally a creative process of in-language copywriting for marketing and promotional content. Transcreation essentially aims to adapt a message written in a source language to the culture and conventions of your target country. This process requires perfect understanding of both cultures to successfully trigger the desired positive emotional response from your target audience.
To illustrate this, here is an example of failed transcreation:
Pepsi was looking to adapt its slogan “Come alive with the Pepsi generation” for the Chinese market. But the campaign failed to achieve its goals when the original slogan was rendered in Chinese as: “Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the grave”.
On the other hand, the American microprocessor manufacturer Intel provides a perfect example of successful transcreation.
The brand was able to adapt its original slogan “Intel: Sponsors of Tomorrow” for the Brazilian market. In Brazil, the slogan became: “Intel: In Love with the Future”. Why? Because the phrase “Sponsors of Tomorrow” translated into Portuguese would suggested that Intel did not uphold their commitments.
