When translating marketing texts from English into another language, we translators have to work with poetic license. Why? Because many marketing phrases contain puns on words or are derived from idioms that cannot be translated word-by-word into another language. Here is a simple example from a project I worked on this week:
I was tasked with translating updates to a website that offers camping equipment and related products. Among the new items for the upcoming season was a particularly versatile piece of garment that can be worn or used as a blanket, either inside a tent or by the campfire. The English tag line was “There is a new [garment] in town.”
While every native English speaker who reads this line instantly recognizes that this phrase stems from “There is a new sheriff in town”, there is no equivalent phrase in German. After all, there never has been a sheriff in any German town, and the image of a one-man police who keeps order in a German village or small town simply does not exist. That is why instead of translating a phrase like this one, we transcreate it. That means, we look at the source text and ask ourselves what the intended message is. We then create the same message in the target language with different words or an equally catchy phrase or similarly funny pun on words.
This is no easy task, and despite the enormous rise of machine translation these days, not even the best software or AI is able to go beyond translating words and simply cannot handle this type of text. Every advertiser knows this, and that is why marketing texts are always handled by human translators – today and in the future. Only trained and experienced marketing translators are able to produce equivalent messages in German (or any other language) that are idiomatically correct, culturally relevant, and specific to the target audience.In the example above, we (myself and an editor) opted for a more descriptive phrase of this brand new garment. We were able to include a certain tongue-in-cheek solution by addressing the fact that this garment is for children and called it …für die Kleinen (“… for the little ones”), which flows quite well in German.