Advertising speaks to the gut: Working with live cultures
To capture hearts and minds, you have to cut through the clamor, remembering that one culture’s music is another’s noise. Striking the right note calls for adaptations that read as if conceived and written in the actual target market.
- “BMPwriters are first and foremost passionate, gifted, non-streamlined, pigheaded creatives who are supreme masters of their craft.”
- “Burton Münch & Partners don’t just translate words, they transfer ideas.”
- “I enjoy nothing more than a healthy bottom line—especially when the text adds up, too.”
Even though globalization and digitization might want to make us think otherwise, the world is still a very diverse place: different value systems, distinctive cultural identities and expectations. Things we’ve been weaned on and that unconsciously shape our worldview. Which is why it takes more than a dictionary to bring a brand world and strategic message to life in another culture.
With creative teams made up of adaptation experts, copywriters and copy editors, we serve clients from AUDI to ZEISS in internationalizing corporate slogans and campaign taglines, headlines, print ads, brand films, customer magazines as well as with writing copy and naming.
Translating ad copy? Adapt it instead.
If you are looking to have advertising copy translated, what you usually need is copy that sells in the target market the way the original sells at home. The industry calls that transcreation. We call it adaptation. Either way, the idea and intent stay, while words and images are free to change. Corporate communications call for powerful writing, not translations.
A campaign adaptation starts with the brief, ideally the same brief and background information you used for the original. Adaptation experts, copywriters and copy editors develop proposals from it in brainstorming sessions and a series of revision loops. The team then assesses each proposal for message, associations, culture-specific aspects, uniqueness and impact, and rules out unintended interpretations that could harm the brand. We can even run microsurveys in the target market to test effectiveness.
Deutsche Bahn is a case in point. Its corporate slogan “Zukunft bewegen” translates literally as “Moving the future”. Our English rendition was “On track for tomorrow”, and it was well received by DB’s English-speaking audience. The really treacherous mistakes, by the way, are rarely the famous howlers. They lurk just under the radar, like ad copy that references dreams the audience does not share because it was written for someone else. Why “On track for tomorrow” works where “Moving the future” merely translates is explained in our guide Transcreation vs. translation: what changes in advertising copy.
You send us your content, we handle the rest: research, cultural filters, proofing and coordination. The aim is copy your target audience reads without the slightest clue that it was not written with them in mind. We hand-pick adaptation teams of mother-tongue experts and copywriters to suit your product, medium and cultural group, and reach target groups in Europe, the UK, the Americas, Japan and China. Advertising and communications agencies work with us, too; see For agencies. And working nights and weekends isn’t off limits if that’s when our clients need us.