Professional translation’s job is to transfer intent, meaning, and culture from a document’s source language to the target language. As a client you may hear one or more of these three words – translation, transliteration, and transcreation.

It is important to understand a little bit more about what each one is, and how it will – or could – come to play in your future translation projects, your conversations and strategic meetings with your translation team.

Translation defined

The process of translation transfers the direct meaning and feeling (or essence) of the written word from one language to another. Translation should not be a simple word-for-word replacement, based only on word meaning or definition.

A comprehensive translation considers multiple factors, including meaning, grammar, contextual meaning, and cultural sensitivities. Let’s take an easy example: if you come across a part of a story where a character says “you are dead meat…” – that is not going to translate well into Spanish if you do a pure word-for-word substitution. In this case, “you are dead meat” means “you are a dead man”. The translator needs to come up with an equally compelling expression (most likely a Spanish idiom) to capture that same energy or meaning.

What is Transliteration?

Transliteration has more to do with sound than meaning. Transliteration is used, for example, for a language that uses characters other than Roman characters (the ones we use to write in English). Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Russian, Hebrew, Arabic, etc. – all these languages may require transliteration, for instance, for an English speaker who cannot read foreign characters or alphabets.

For example, American executives probably can’t read hiragana, one of Japan’s written forms, a professional translator would use transliteration to spell, Ohayōgozaimasu, so it’s legible to them. Transliteration would also make it possible to write “good morning” in English using Japanese characters so a Japanese speaker could pronounce “good morning” in English just by reading the Japanese characters.

Understanding Transcreation

Transcreation is a deeper level of translation. It is a term used mainly by marketing and advertising experts and professionals to describe the process of adopting a message from one language to another language while maintaining its intent, style, tone, and context — “localizing” the message to the country where it is going to be used. Advertisements, commercials, mottos, and slogans, which often use figurative language (metaphors, similes, analogies or colloquialisms) will typically require transcreation – a process that preserves everything that is conveyed by the written or spoken word that can’t be translated word for word into the target language without losing or changing its meaning or intent.