Localisation At Its Best
For this drinks campaign, Creative Producer Lauri King came to Talking Heads to localise a playful, tongue-in-cheek campaign for Krupnik’s Rose and Pistacio Liqueurs.
We’ve chosen this as a fantastic example of localisation (the process of translating AND making the content local in character) as our Polish translation was not the same as the English source text - it couldn’t, and shouldn’t be!
Examples:
The campaign title THE ‘I ONLY DRINK PASTELS’ DIET, communicating people’s obsession with fad diets, simply wouldn’t work in Poland.
The literal translation Piję tylko pastele wouldn’t work because pastele is a common word for a type of crayons in Polish.
Piję tylko pastelowe kolory (I Drink Only Pastel Colours) seems too long, rather mundane and doesn’t communicate the intended meaning.
DIETA PASTELOWA was chosen as it is effective in Polish because it plays on typical names for diets and references a Polish cultural element - the popular dieta pudełkowa (box diet). Here, instead of eating out of a box, you drink pastel drinks.
The English concept pure fun in a glass was also not translated verbatim.
The literal translation czysta zabawa w kieliszku has negative associations with alcoholism - in Polish, there is a saying, drown your sorrows in a glass, and anything with w kieliszku brings that to mind.
The word zabawa is also awkward in translations because of its many meanings that can add problematic layers (referencing children’s play, which we would not want to associate with alcohol).
The Polish phrase baw się kolorami (play with colour) was chosen as a suitable ‘transcreation’ (combining translation with creative copywriting and cultural adaptation). The client then chose to use the phrase Play With Colour for the campaign in Poland. This is often why different markets will have different slogans and activation types.
Cocktail was translated as drinka, not koktajl, because the Polish usage of that word refers to a different type of cocktail drink and would be misleading.
It is easy to see from these few brief examples how even the smallest amount of text takes time, consideration, expertise, experience and cultural knowledge to be translated correctly.
See the full shoot / campaign, including our translations at lauriking.com/projects/pastelsroza and lauriking.com/projects/pastelspistacja.
“When I reviewed the translations, at first I thought that they were incorrect. Seeing the explanations helped me to realise that exactly the correct choices were made for my client and the market. A straightforward translation would have been incorrect, inappropriate and embarrassing for me and my client.”
