We recently worked with a global client, creating ads that needed to be spread across seven language markets – Spanish, Portuguese, German, French, Italian, Japanese and Korean. The initial process had the internal team translating our copy from US English into each language and handing the copy back for visual production. The bottleneck was constant. The meaning was inconsistent. Not wrong, exactly. Just off.
It wasn’t until we embedded transcreation properly into this process that we understood what we’d been missing.
Relying on AI translations to broadcast one ad message across the globe ignores the complexities and nuances of your audiences. Transcreation is the creative layer that can be the difference between a campaign that lands and a PR disaster. Here’s why creating human-led, culturally specific ad copy is still worth the investment.
Key takeaways
- Transcreation adapts content for a new market by preserving meaning, emotion and intent – not just words
- Translation works for technical or factual content while transcreation is essential for creative, emotional or high-stakes marketing
- AI can handle repetitive, low-risk translation at scale. It can’t yet replicate the cultural nuance and creative judgement that transcreation demands
- The instinct to treat US English as the global default is one of the most common and costly mistakes in international marketing
- Global brands that invest in proper transcreation connect more authentically with local audiences and avoid the kind of cultural missteps that damage trust
What is transcreation?
Translation + creation = transcreation.
Transcreation is the process of adapting content from one language into another in a way that preserves the original meaning, tone, intent and emotional impact – even if that means changing the words entirely.
It’s a creative process, as well as a linguistic one, requiring native speakers, cultural insiders and skilled copywriters to get across the core meaning, implication and emotion to the audience it speaks to.
Sometimes this can lead to a completely different idea, expressed through a different cultural reference, idiom or creative construct that lands the same way in its native context.
| Take, for example, Innocent Drinks. Naming their smoothie products after playful puns like ‘Skip to the beet’ meant they had to get creative when naming products in non-English speaking countries. The company decided to employ local copywriters to test puns, slang and jokes in other languages – leading to growth across Western Europe. |
Transcreation vs translation
| Translation | Transcreation | |
| What is it | Converts content from one language to another as accurately as possible, staying faithful to the source text. | The creative layer on top. Even if it’s technically correct, does it actually work? Does the humour land? Would a native speaker have written it this way? |
| When to use it | Legal and compliance documentationTechnical product informationInternal communicationsKnowledge base and support content | Campaign headlines and slogansAdvertising copy and creative scriptsBrand positioning statements and taglinesSocial media contentEmail marketing and CRMLanding pages and conversion-focused content |
The higher the stakes of the creative decision, and the more the content relies on tone, humour, cultural familiarity or emotional impact, the more transcreation earns its place in the process.
Why global brands can’t just hit translate
US/UK English has long been used as the universal default. And this is where marketing agencies have been going wrong.
Treating audiences in places as rich and diverse as Germany, Japan, Korea or Brazil the same, just with a different linguistic wrapper, is reductive. And audiences can feel it.
These audiences have different cultural contexts, different humour registers, different ways of processing a brand message, different expectations of what a piece of advertising is supposed to do. Running one ad message across the globe is just broadcasting, not marketing.
| When it goes wrong, the impact can be major. Earlier this year, Mike Golden, President of Brandigo in China, shared his journey and reflections on the Chinese market at our offices. In China, if your brand doesn’t have a Chinese name, consumers will create one for you. Mike shared the example of Airbnb, whose Chinese name was constructed around the concepts of ‘love’, ‘togetherness’ and ‘welcome’. Let’s just say the implications of the new name weren’t as wholesome as they had imagined and Airbnb swiftly exited the Chinese market. And in 2018, Mercedes-Benz posted an Instagram caption quoting the Dalai Lama alongside a luxury car. The quote was innocuous enough but the association violated Beijing’s political stance on Tibet. The post was deleted, multiple apologies were issued on Weibo and the company committed publicly to deepening its understanding of Chinese culture. These examples stress the importance of checking cultural and political sensitivities before anything goes live. Read more about the myths and realities of marketing in China |
Why AI isn’t the answer…yet
More and more, people assume AI is the answer to everything at scale. And in some cases, it is. For repetitive, low-risk, technical translation like product names, legal copy, data labels and support documentation, AI tools are fast and capable.
But creative marketing content is different. The things that make a line of copy land – cultural context, tonal register, idiomatic familiarity, the specific connotations a word carries in a particular language at a particular moment – require human insight, creativity and cultural knowledge that AI models can’t reliably replicate.
AI translation works by finding statistical patterns across vast amounts of existing content. That means it reflects the average of what already exists. Transcreation requires going beyond the average to find the creative solution that feels completely natural to a native speaker.
The model needs to be human creativity multiplied by AI efficiency. Save AI for work that doesn’t require cultural nuance or creative judgement. Invest human time and transcreation expertise into the work that does.
The StrategiQ takeaway
Global ambition requires local intelligence.
We need to invest in understanding our audiences better, and then build the creative work around them. That takes human expertise, cultural knowledge, writers who are native speakers and clients willing to brief for local audiences rather than assuming a global asset will do the job.
AI will continue to improve and will handle more of the low-stakes, high-volume translation work. But the layer of human creativity on top of AI scale isn’t going away. If anything, as AI makes generic translation cheaper, the premium on genuine creative transcreation will increase.
Because no model has yet learned how to find the joke that lands, the idiom that resonates or the cultural reference that makes an audience feel seen. That’s still a human job.
We’re increasingly working with ambitious global brands who want to get this right. If that’s you, let’s talk.