Multicultural Marketing

If you want to market your products and promote your brand consistently and successfully in multiple languages and cultures, Overtaal offers you just what you need. Whether you’re a business looking to adapt and target your branding, marketing, and advertising for new markets, or an agency working toward these goals on a client’s behalf, Overtaal’s multicultural marketing solutions help ensure maximum impact for your efforts.

You will have a dedicated Overtaal project manager to ensure smooth, professional communication and a perfect fit of our solutions to your needs. Your project manager is your point of contact with our multicultural marketing creative team, consisting of experts who understand the impact of specific language, images, colours, and other creative elements in worldwide markets as well as specific cultures. Designers from different countries and cultures can develop or adapt creative material to meet your needs. Working either with your creative team or as your creative team, they provide the specific expertise you require.

So whether your focus is on worldwide markets, or on a specific sub-culture in your own country, Overtaal has the essential cultural expertise. Our multicultural marketing team will partner with you to maximise the effectiveness of your marketing campaign. Our expert copywriting and marketing linguists can adapt pre-existing creative material, or develop multicultural marketing concepts from the outset. Our technology tools help streamline processes, creating efficiencies across your entire campaign lifecycle.

Use our services specifically for copy localisation or transcreation, or partner with us for the whole creative chain from concept to realisation.

Cultural Consulting

Hours of thought go into selecting every tiny element of a campaign—the finest details can often make the difference between success and failure. When international markets are involved, cultural nuances can be too numerous to track, and the full creative process needs to be replicated in each market. Our cultural consultants possess or gather current, reliable, and insightful information about your concept(s), your target market, and how to best adapt existing copy or to create original copy/creative material that will produce the desired result. With Overtaal working for you, your executive and strategic teams will have the necessary information to make intelligent business and marketing decisions.

Overtaal's cultural consulting services allow you to make informed decisions on all aspects of marketing in diverse cultures.

Copy localisation / adaptation & transcreation

Nuances make all the difference in marketing and branding campaigns. So having spent significant time and energy on producing effective copy and creative material in your source language, it is important to ensure you do not let this go to waste by settling for simple, ‘straight’ translations at the time when you are aiming for international success.

Taglines, catchphrases, headlines, and other creative marketing copy are often based on culturally dependent elements, including idioms, puns, word play, association, subtext, or rhymes in the source language. If translated directly into another language, these elements may not make sense, or worse, can be potentially offensive. Such texts require more than a straightforward translation – they need to be ‘transcreated’ to ensure their impact is retained. Our transcreation services encompass drafting, testing, and refining stages – similar to the workflow used by advertising agencies to write source copy – in order to achieve the desired effect in the target language.
 

Your Brand, Your Voice

The same kind of process can also be applied to longer body copy where appropriate, such as multilingual websites. In contrast to the standard translation process which aims to produce final text matching the source language as closely as possible without changing the meaning, for certain texts the main priority should be to duplicate the impact of the text on the target audience. This may be a matter of creating and maintaining a brand image, a call to action or awareness building. In such cases, rather than being as faithful as possible to the meaning of the source text, it may indeed be best to make textual changes.

Overtaal’s transcreation and copy localisation/adaptation services are all about developing the most appropriate creative solution for the target market(s). This is a collaborative process between Overtaal and the client. We will present the client with several options, if necessary with a back translation and a detailed explanation of why specific words or phrases were chosen and what impact those choices will have in the target culture. Together, we will determine the best final language that we think will resonate with the target audience.

Graphics and Multimedia Solutions

We complement our language services with associated technology, because whereas it is one thing to have a translation, it often is a completely different matter to implement it. We have the typesetting and graphics tools, as well as the necessary linguistic expertise, to take the hassle out of producing multilingual content for print, websites, and software applications. But that covers just written text. As a modern company, you will also deal with audio and video. We offer a multitude of services to cover all of your multimedia needs. We can translate spoken texts in multimedia assets, but we can also assist you in the full production lifecycle of the relevant material. Whether you need a voiceover, lip-synchronised audio or subtitles, Overtaal can help you out.

• Lip synchronisation
• Documentary style narration
• Voiceovers for online training material
• Subtitling
• Closed captions