Translation, transcreation, and the difference that costs you

Translation takes a text and renders it accurately in another language. Done well, it is a demanding, technical craft and there is nothing lesser about it. It is also, for some jobs, exactly the wrong purchase.

Transcreation starts somewhere else entirely: not from the source text, but from the brief behind it. What was this line supposed to do — and what would do that here, to these readers, in this language? The output may share no vocabulary with the original at all, and still be the correct answer.

The clearest test is humour, because humour breaks first. A pun is a coincidence between two words in one language; it almost never survives the crossing. A translator handed a headline built on a pun has two bad options and no good ones. A transcreator has a different job — find the joke that works here — and needs the brief, the brand voice and the licence to depart from the source to do it.

This is why transcreation is billed by the hour and translation by the word. You are not buying more words. You are buying the decision about which words, and that does not scale with length.

Buying translation when you needed transcreation costs you twice: once for the work, and again for the campaign that landed flat in four markets.