CREDENTIAL | Translation vs. Transcreation – Transcreation making differences (English to Korean)

Recent times have seen deliberate use of ‘translatese’ working effectively to some extent in certain areas of marketing in Korea; however, in the field of localization, transcreation, or creative translation, should always take precedence, and translatese should never be seen.

Transcreation: A process of adapting a message from one language to another, while maintaining its intent, style, tone and context.
(Source: wikipedia.org)

Let’s start with a simple example.

Of course no one in Korea would fail to understand the meaning of ‘i?i??i?i?? ii??i??i??izi??ei???ei??i??’; however, this ‘i?i??i?i?? ii??i??i??’ greeting cannot be found anywhere in historical Korean documents, and is in fact a literal translation of the English phrase.

The above example can be translated naturally and relevant to the situation by transcreating as follows:

On the other hand, careless transcreation can inadvertently bring about problems such as the following…

(An excerpt from Twitter Customer Support)

In the above case, the translation is much better than if it were to be translated like “Let’s learn how to mute, block, and report to manage Twitter life better.”

However, the translated sentence is still quite unnatural, and unsuitable for publication by an international corporation.

The above syntax could be improved in the following ways.

As long as there is no real need for literal translation in the pertinent field (law, medicine, etc.) it is crucial that the translator has discretion to disassemble, interpret and express as he sees fit, and this is why it is vital that a native speaker of the target language performs the translation.

How is transcreative approach different from conventional translation?