Producing effective English versions of original French material is more difficult than ever and the excellent quality of translation apps like DeepL is partly to blame. That’s because translation isn’t nearly as effective as adaptation – also called transcreation – in marketing campaigns and in other communications where creating an emotional connection is important for getting your message across.

Here’s why:

• Translation simply converts French words into English words
• Adaptation converts French words into the most appropriate English equivalents
• Adaptation creates English content to convey the true essence of the French
• Adaptation includes English idioms to improve impact
• Adaptation adjusts figures of speech so they work in English
• Adaptation takes all possible English word connotations into consideration

If translated English versions of your original French material are not doing the job for you, send the material to me and I’ll send you back adapted English versions that will better resonate with your target markets. You’ll see the difference right away...and so will they. – Lawrence Creaghan

Lawrence Creaghan

“…no matter how assiduous you are, you can’t turn a bad translation into a good one: You can only make it less bad.” – Robert Gottlieb