Translation, transcreation & copywriting. Confused?

Standard translation: moving your words

Plenty of people now begin with AI, pasting a chunk of text into a machine translator to see what comes back. That's a reasonable place to start. For straightforward, factual content it can do a fair amount of the legwork, as long as a human reviews the result afterwards. Standard translation, whether it begins with a person or a machine, does one job: it carries the meaning of your source text into another language as faithfully as possible.

It's the most literal of the three, and the most economical. It suits text that just needs to be good enough, plain and factual, where the point is to be understood rather than polished, such as product catalogues, technical guides and training and user manuals. A machine can carry the gist; a human reviewer is what turns that into something you can rely on.

The thing to keep an eye on is what happens when plain translation meets marketing. A slogan that feels quirky and memorable in English can come out stilted, or even a little comic, once it's been moved across word for word. Jokes don't always travel. Tone slips. It's less a catastrophe than a missed opportunity, the gap between copy that sings and copy that merely works. It's also where leaning on a machine alone tends to show, since AI has no sense of whether a phrase charms or clangs.

Transcreation: moving your meaning

Transcreation is a blend of translation and creation. Instead of mirroring your words, a specialist linguist who also writes copy rebuilds the message so it lands with the same intent and feeling in the new market as it did in the original. The wording might change completely. The effect stays the same.

This is the one to use when content is doing brand work: campaigns, advertising, brochures, taglines, anything meant to persuade or charm rather than simply inform. It costs more than standard translation because it takes more skill and more time, and for the right material that's money well spent.

It's also the one place AI genuinely doesn't belong. Transcreation runs on cultural instinct, humour, emotional judgement and a writer's ear, the very things software doesn't possess. A tool can translate a tagline well enough; it can't tell you the joke will fall flat in Lisbon. For technical or regulated material, by contrast, transcreation is overkill, because invention is the last thing you want there.

Copywriting: starting fresh

Copywriting skips the source text altogether. A writer works from a brief and creates new material directly in the target language, built around your goals and the local reader. Nothing is being converted from anything; it's original from the first word.

It's the natural pick when relevance beats equivalence, for things like blogs, articles and landing pages aimed at one particular market. Words written for readers in Madrid can speak to their lives rather than recycling a story shaped for Manchester. Advice on the best boots for a rainy hill walk might delight a Scottish reader and mean very little on the Costa del Sol. Copywriting lets you write what each audience genuinely wants to read.

The exception is anything closely tied to brand guidelines, a homepage being the obvious case, where transcreation gives you more consistency to lean on.

A quick way to decide

You rarely need to overthink it. One question usually settles things: how much of your brand is in this piece?

• Plain, factual text that just needs to be understood: standard translation will do the job.
• A message you want to keep, adapted for a new audience: transcreation.
• Something fresh for a specific market, with no original worth saving: copywriting.

In practice, most multilingual projects use a mix of all three, matched to what each piece is doing. That blend tends to be the most cost-effective route as well.

If you'd like a hand

Not sure which one your content needs? That's the normal state of affairs, and it's an easy conversation to have. Our team can help you sort translation, transcreation and copywriting across your project, so each piece gets the treatment that fits.