Marketing and advertising content is key to showcasing your organization’s offer and brand. If you do business in multiple languages, you need to connect with very different audiences, each of them with its own unique language and culture. As studies have shown time and time again, tailoring content to the linguistic and cultural specificities of each regional, national or international market delivers far greater appeal and impact.

Though you want to present your brand and message consistently across markets, you can’t or shouldn’t always use identical content for every language or culture. Beyond translation, there’s often a need for adaptation or even transcreation. Your challenge, then, is to balance consistency and customization.

It may seem logical to work with a marketing or advertising agency for this kind of multilingual balancing act, but, in fact, professional translation companies often turn out to be better partners for several reasons. Here, we offer four reasons why a translation agency may be the smart choice.

Reason 1: Creative savvy perfectly aligned with your brand and strategy

From ads, billboards, slogans, and product names and packaging, to podcasts, social media posts, websites, and beyond: marketing and advertising content is not only incredibly diverse, much of it is also highly stylized and unique. Depending on the format, style and concept, one of three different approaches may work best:

• Translation, which is ideally suited to more descriptive content.
• Adaptation, which goes a step further than translation and rephrases language- and culture‑specific elements such as puns, humour and colloquial expressions.
• Transcreation, which goes even further than adaptation and allows you to reframe original concepts that simply aren’t meaningful in the target language or market.

The experts you entrust with your multilingual projects must be capable of choosing the right approach every time (translation, adaptation or transcreation), and possess the creative savvy to deliver content that is impactful and also perfectly captures your image and vision. Although the wording in each language may vary to appeal to different markets, there’s just no room for reinventing the wheel when it comes to your brand and strategy.

Why are professional translation companies better at this? Their translation, adaptation and transcreation experts are used to working creatively within a predefined strategic framework. Their unique profile is quite different from that of ad agency creatives who thrive on developing new concepts from scratch.

Reason 2: Linguistic and cultural expertise

Language professionals in translation companies have all the linguistic and cultural skills relevant to their target market and industry. Beyond in-depth knowledge of both their source and target languages, this means unmatched command of many more “technical” elements, such as the rules and subtleties of grammar and terminology. Creative teams in marketing and advertising agencies generally lack that type and level of expertise.

Thanks to their exceptional language and cultural skills, translation agency professionals always find original and idiomatic ways of conveying your messages and driving your strategy forward. Marketing and advertising agencies sometimes come up with extravagant adaptations or transcreations featuring expressions that don’t make sense or that nobody would use in the target language. That doesn’t happen when you entrust your content to a professional translation company. Every pun, every idea, works in terms of your brand and strategy, but also in terms of language rules and cultural references. That’s how you get content that comes across naturally, as opposed to something that may land poorly with your target audience.

Any good language service provider should have a local translation, adaptation and transcreation team for each target market. Local, in this case, means that language experts originate from, and live in, the target market and culture they serve. We’re not talking about people who generally speak the language but come from another culture and geography. France and Quebec, for example, are two very distinct French-speaking markets, each one requiring its own language experts.

Reason 3: Translation and management capacity to meet all your needs

Whether you need translation, adaptation or transcreation services for occasional requests or for hundreds of projects every month, qualified local resources should always be readily available to help.

Professional translation companies are the only providers with large enough teams of translation, adaptation and transcreation specialists to offer guaranteed availability at all times in any language or market. Major players typically have a reliable network of global partners or offices worldwide.

Another difference from marketing and advertising agencies is that project managers who work in professional translation companies know all the ins and outs of translation, adaptation and transcreation projects. Your best bet is to choose a translation provider with certified processes that comply with language-industry quality standards.

Three certifications that confirm the excellence of a translation company

• International certification ISO 17100 and its Canadian equivalent, CGSB 131.10, confirm that a company follows effective and secure processes across its operations, including staffing, technology, language services, project management, information security and more.
• International certification ISO 18587 documents all the requirements and skills needed for postediting machine translations, including output from AI tools.

Reason 4: Access to specialized technology

Professional translation companies are also technology experts. They alone can make optimal use of all the cutting-edge tools and systems that deliver time and cost savings in translation, adaptation or transcreation projects. Three key strengths—which marketing and advertising agencies simply don’t have—enable translation companies to provide unmatched value.

1 – Integrated technology ecosystem

Professional translation companies operate a full range of essential applications: expert project management systems, AI tools, neural machine translation systems, translation memories, termbases and more. Their ecosystem is not just comprehensive, it’s 100% secure. Each of its highly specialized tools and systems contributes unique benefits to the quality and efficiency equation. These combine with the strategic creativity of language experts to guarantee the very best results in multilingual translation, adaptation and transcreation projects.

2 – Visionary IT expertise

Professional translation companies have their own team of IT experts who specialize in state of the art language technology. That means you can rely on tech whizzes with vision, a strategic mindset and a proven ability to build, maintain and enhance the company’s complex ecosystem as new technologies emerge.

3 – Versatile language teams

Translation, adaptation and transcreation professionals also have very specific skills required to revise (postedit) content generated by AI and machine translation systems. You can always expect professional work that leverages human ingenuity and a full command of the technology that will really benefit your organization.

Thanks to their dynamic and customized use of the best and safest technology, professional translation companies deliver maximum benefits. 

Performance – Every professional works faster, which results in lower costs and the ability to meet your tight deadlines, even for major projects.

Quality – Machine translation systems can be trained with content that’s relevant to your industry or even specifically to your organization. You get flawless translations, always in line with your messages, strategy and terminology.

Security – Professional translation companies use secure tools. You never have to worry about your organization’s confidential information ending up on the web.

Choosing the provider that best meets your needs

When considering professional language service providers for translation, adaptation and transcreation, be sure to rely on selection criteria that reflect all your requirements. The following shouldn’t be overlooked:

• Proven specialization in marketing and advertising for your industry
• Full range of services (translation, adaptation and transcreation)
• Sufficient capacity for every language and market you target
• Local experts for those languages and markets
• Specific training and experience of language experts and project managers
• Dedicated team to serve your organization
• Language-industry certification for all processes (including language services and project management)
• Knowledge and use of the best technology
• Security and confidentiality guarantees

Choosing the best partner for your multilingual marketing and advertising content pays off in many ways. In addition to fast turnaround times, cost savings and guaranteed protection of your confidential information, you get a full range of quality professional services. And beyond linguistic accuracy, quality means effective messaging aligned with your brand and strategies, even for very creative content.

Versacom’s the right partner, for all the right reasons

For the past three decades, Versacom has successfully catered to the strategic creative needs of hundreds of organizations in key industries: marketing and communications, finance and insurance, food, fashion, life sciences, cosmetics, transportation, law, IT, telecom and more.

We have local teams of experts ready to work on the translation, adaptation or transcreation of your marketing and advertising content for multilingual markets worldwide. This includes the single largest team of Quebec-based language experts—powerful allies for your organization in this exceptionally demanding French-language market.

Versacom holds quality certifications CGSB 131.10, ISO 17100, and ISO 18587. We leverage the best technology solutions in targeted and customized ways, wherever they deliver measurable efficiency gains without jeopardizing quality or information security.

From your very first interaction with us, you’ll see that we understand the value of personalized service and solutions. Our mission is to help give your brand, strategy and content the same compelling impact wherever you do business locally, nationally or internationally.