Is translating your advert enough to sell abroad?

The usual way a small business goes international is to translate the website and run the same adverts. It is cheap, it is fast, and it produces campaigns that are grammatically perfect and commercially dead.

Four things translation does not touch

Idiom. "Knock it out of the park" translates into a sentence about baseball, in a country with no baseball.

Humour. The register that reads as friendly and self-deprecating in one market reads as unserious in another. This is the one that costs the most, because the business cannot hear it.

Currency and price psychology. A converted price is not a local price. £49 becomes an odd number nobody would ever print, and the conventions for what looks cheap differ by market.

Legal and religious sensitivity. What may be shown, claimed, compared or depicted varies, and the consequences range from a refused advert to something much worse than a refused advert.

So the engine transcreates, and then stops

Idioms, humour, cultural references, currency and sensitivities are adapted per market — and then, for any market flagged as religion- or legal-sensitive, the creative is held for human review before any send.

That hold is the important part. The engine could produce a confident adaptation for every market in the world; it refuses to let the sensitive ones go out unread. The cost of being wrong in that category is not a lost sale, it is a boycott and a screenshot, and no model's cultural judgement is worth that risk.

The output for every market is labelled a recommended adaptation, not a guarantee of lift. There is no fabricated metric about how much better the localised version will do.

The fixed exchange rate, which looks like a bug

The FX table is fixed rather than live, and that is deliberate.

A live rate means the same campaign, rebuilt on Tuesday, prices differently from Monday — and nobody decided that. A price that moves without a decision is harder to manage than one that is slightly stale, especially when it is printed in creative you cannot recall.

When you want the price to change, change it. That is a decision with a person behind it.

The markets come from the brand

They are read off the brand record rather than passed in on every run.

That started as a convenience and turned out to matter: when the caller supplies the list each time, the two can disagree — and the failure is silent. You end up with creative localised for a market you do not sell in, which is money spent on something unusable, and nobody notices because the output looks correct.

The media plan, because the creative is not only text

Each adapted version comes with a plan for voiceover, subtitles or lip-sync, because a localised campaign that reuses the original audio is a localised campaign in name only — and for video, the audio is most of the comprehension.

The honest division of labour

Mechanical adaptation is a machine's job: currency, format, date conventions, the obvious idioms, the flagged sensitivities. Judging whether a joke lands in a market is a person's job, and preferably a person from that market.

A tool claiming to do the second is the one to be careful with.

The question to ask

Before any international campaign: who in this market has read this, and what did they say?

If the answer is nobody, you have a translation. That is a start, not a campaign.