Good Practices for Transcreation, or "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Embraced the Kludge"

Transcreation is the red blood cell of localization: the itty-bitty decisions that breathe life into the greater whole of a fictional world adapted to function outside of its original cultural constraints. Done properly, it provokes the same thoughts and emotions the original authors intended for their home audience, carrying a message that resonates in the human universality we share, even with someone on the other side of the globe. Done sloppily, it wrenches the recipient out of immersion, causing frowns, snickering, or puzzlement. And may the many-tongued gods have mercy on your soul if you do improper transcreation in a well-established franchise, for you’ll likely attract the attention of the most relentless predators known to humanity… Fandom purists.

A well-executed transcreative process feels like an exquisite piece of jewelry, where the gems were delicately pushed into place by the feather-light hammer taps of a master artisan.

The truth is that the transcreator probably went dumpster diving at the museum in search of a rusty piece of pipe, which they sawed in seven different lengths before picking one, then proceeded to cover it in hot-glued resin beads from the nearest hippie street vendor, and then finally presented it to you with just the right amount of “trust me, bro” energy to make it look like the work of a genius. If they’re particularly competent, they might even be smiling amidst the bruises, cuts, and sanity damage incurred, because they’re legitimately proud of their beautiful eldritch abomination.

But there is, in fact, method to the madness. For the next thousand or so words, we’ll go over key practices in transcreation considered important by this humble translator whose sole inspiration coined the Brazilian names for the hit characters Cuphead & Mugman, so well-received they were used in the official dubbing of the animated series.

No language comes into being overnight, fully formed and immutable. We are all speaking the latest and heavily adapted version of the grunts-with-meanings our ancestors emitted: Latin, Ancient Greek, Saxon, Celtic, Norman, Arabic, etc. That means most words we use today have archaic versions (or, even better, roots) that we understand at an instinctive, pattern-recognition level. For example, if you speak a Romance or Germanic language, chances are you’ll immediately flag any word ending in “polis” or “burg” as a city, no matter how ludicrous the rest of it is.

Digging into your language’s etymology allows you to hack words apart and glue them together, preserving the bits of meaning you want and mixing them into a complex concept that would otherwise require an entire sentence to convey. Big names not only make the text clunky and less immersive, but can also snag you on technical limitations, if you’re working with length constraints of any kind.

Note, however, that there is an “usually” in the title above. While etymology can greatly increase your creative possibilities, you still have to make sure what you’re creating will be understood. The problem is that languages are fickle things, and sometimes the entirety of a word can take on a new meaning regardless of where it came from, or maybe the older versions are so niche and obscure no one will make the connection you want.

Brazilian gamers quite recently achieved a hard-fought milestone: after decades of loyal consumption and the birth of a burgeoning game translation market, Nintendo-senpai started noticing us and translating main line games into Portuguese, including recent darling The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom. And, in a bold and divisive move, the localization team decided to adapt the name of one of the main tribes, the Rito bird-people. No doubt, that decision was taken to avoid possible misunderstandings, since “rito” means “rite” in Portuguese, but the team knew what they were doing.

For the new name, “Ará”, they took the original context of the Japanese word, a simple but effective inversion of “tori” (lit. “bird”), and dug into a criminally underutilized source of etymology: Brazilian indigenous languages. Not only does “Ará” mean the exact same thing in the Tupy language, but we also have a very famous species of parrot called “Arara”.

This pretty much guarantees any Brazilian that reads the name will instinctively associate it with birds, and those who learn about the Tupi connection will actually go home just a little bit smarter. And, in the end, isn’t that what culture is all about?

To start my next point, repeat after me, kids…

I love working on released games. I love clients who send us keys for what we’re translating. I love Q&A sheets that get answered quickly and clearly readable metadata in my CATs. Why? Because translations live or die on context.

Knowing whether a single-word string is a button or a header, knowing how many people there are in a conversation, knowing the <bleep> gender of a character called some unrecognizable mess of letters so that I don’t have to tie my predominantly gendered language into a <bleep> pretzel to avoid a mother<bleep> adjective!

Transcreation obviously benefits from this as well. The more you know about the term you’re adapting, the more avenues of meaning you can explore when building the new word in your language. And you absolutely should do that.

The #1 shortcoming newbies I work with face is adhering to the source text too much. The ultimate creative translators are those who can reduce the texts they’re working with to amorphous blobs of meaning to be distributed in any order across a paragraph, leaving nothing out but making sure the text feels like it was written by a native.

I love me some Warhammer 40k, even if the wargaming community in my country consists basically of twenty well-off thirty-somethings in a single miniature shop in São Paulo. While diving into the lore of factions I don’t usually engage with, I came upon the veteran space elf pirates known as Corsair Voidscarred. My permanently engaged translation lobe immediately went “Oof”.

Life isn’t very fair. While some of us have to dig into Latin or Greek roots, always keep possible portmanteaus at the tip of our tongues and mouth a new word off several times to make sure it doesn’t sound unintentionally silly, English speakers can just slap two words together and immediately have it sound cool and mystic and stuff. We love you, anglophones, but we hate how easy you’ve got it, especially since we’re usually translating from English, so your cakewalk becomes our via-crucis.

In the above example, “scarred” isn’t an easy word to adapt concisely. The root word, “cicatriz” (scar) is already half as long as the source, and that’s without conjugation or the concept of “void”, the addition of which would normally require a preposition and spaces. All was lost!

Cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria! That is, until I found this tidbit of lore: “Many have earned a degree of infamy amongst their own kind for their ruthless deeds or for the extent their souls have been hardened by a lifetime of space travel.”

That told me a few things: what kind of scars they carried, what made those scars, and, perhaps most importantly, that “Voidscarred” might not be a compliment. That opened a cosmos of possibilities, pun intended, because history shows it’s a lot easier to make an insult short and snappy than a respectful title.

Since their souls were hardened by the void, why not call them “Almavazias” (“Empty/Void Souls”)? It has a lovely double-meaning with the void of space and a lack of emotion, and it’s something I can easily picture the Aeldari, who guard their souls closely, say in a scoffing tone out of earshot.

No matter how much the corporate overlords keep pushing us to believe otherwise, translation is creative work. If you’re working on anything with more life than an internal memo for a multinational corporation or government office, you’re being creative. And if there’s one thing human creativity needs to work, it’s raw feeling. Mouthfeel. Prosody.

The as-yet-unquantifiable “Je ne sais quoi” ofbeing. There’s no greater expression of the kludgy mess that is our thought process while transcreating than simply muttering your new word aloud, imposing it on the world, and listening to your own feelings about it, and possibly some friends’ feelings, too.

This might require some introspection training if you’re not familiar with it, but, with practice, you can judge a word as it’s coming out of the proverbial oven, collating the impressions your brain feeds you into a “Yass!” or a “This ain’t it”.

And the reason this is last in our brief list is exactly because harnessing your own cognition goes through everything we discussed above: you read whatever context your client has deigned to provide (if any :’) ), then you mash words together until something kind of sticks, and then you let the result linger in your mind for a while,feelingfor that click. Even if it takes an extra jiggle, a different suffix, a trim-down, or starting over, at some point you’ll land on something that you’re satisfied with.

For a brief exercise: imagine you’re tasked with translating the name of a blood-hungry chieftain from a barbarian horde that speaks in very broken Common. While considering possibilities, ask yourself things like: Which makes more sense? Which one sounds the best? Is said chieftain an anomaly in that group, or are they the latest to hold that title after ritual combat? Which part of the name is more relevant to that culture: the leadership or the bloodthirst? What does the order of words calls to mind first: the agent or the object? Every answer is an extra dot on that winding road.

If you’re looking for a smörgåsbord of transcreative… well, creativity, look no further than Guerrilla Games’ Horizon series. Its setting hits the sweet spot of freedom and challenge: we’re still dealing with humans, but they are so far removed from modern culture they had to rename basically everything. That requires embracing the concepts they have access to in their new world and avoiding our own unless told otherwise. Oh, and the words created also had high chances of being verbalized in cutscenes, so you had to keep them at a similar length and mouthfeel to the original in English.

If transcreation is the red blood cell of localization, Horizon had a serious case of sickle-cell anemia. The localization teams had to fight for every breath of life they imparted to the games.

In Portuguese and French, the sun-centered Carja Sundom became “Solar” and “Solmínio”, toothy boys Snapmaws became “Bocarras” and “Chascafauces” and Thunderjaws, a.k.a. Tyrannosauruses-with-Field-Artillery™ became “Tirânicos” and “Gueule-d’orages”. If Horizon was translated in your language, and especially if it has native voice acting, give it a spin and pay attention to the names of machines and cities. There’s a lot of work hidden under those hoods.

In conclusion, being a good transcreator requires balancing raw linguistic knowledge and logical association with creative thought, metacognition, and empathy. It’s about setting steps to your process, following them, and, crucially, knowing when to take a break.

Yeah, here’s a bonus tip for y’all: if a word just isn’t clicking, step away, go do something else, maybe go to sleep and tackle it in the morning, if your deadline allows it. Creating new words is art, and art is like farting: if you’re having to push it too hard, you’ll probably get shit in the end.

(And for those of you actually translating office memos: We see you. We care about you. There’s more to life than this. Please seek help.)