Copywriting - Science topic

I did, thank you, it worked :)

If it is a copyrighted work, you have to seek permission from the owner of its copyright before you publish it in your journal. Otherwise your action will fall in the infringement of the copyright.

are you sure licenced doesn't apply on the R and not on the book?

If you want to provide better understanding of “the translation process” in real-world advertising copy development I would focus a bit more a couple of ideas.

As background, I was born, raised and worked professionally in English and Spanish all my life, completed doctoral studies in psycholinguistics, and co-founded and ran the largest “transcultural” marketing, advertising and consumer research consultancy in the US Hispanic and Latin American markets. Before selling the company to Taylor-Nelson-Sofres, we conducted several hundred transcultural adhoc projects per year.

To eliminate any academic overlay, the real world of ad copy development involves a close working relationship between: (a) brand manager, (b) ad agency account exec, (c) ad agency copy writer(s), (d) consumer research agency’s transcultural, company and brand strategic analyst.

Since brand managers pay for ad copy development, they expect that copy generate ad copy-recall and persuasion measures that have a track record of effectiveness in their industry, company and their particular brand; that plus brand managers’ personal years of experience and proven measures with the brand and target market.

To develop effective ad copy in transcultural markets, novices use “translation” while experts use “adaptation.” Some novices use “back-translation,” which anthropologists developed for field studies with indigenous populations; while useful for ethnological research, back-translation does not produce reliable, persuasive, “case-moving” ad copy. Additionally, in anthropology there are no serious consequences, like losing your job if you cause a measurable decline in the brand’s sales and loss of share of market.

In Brazil our client was executing an expensive national probability sample in a sensitive service category. Our consumer research partners assigned the survey instrument to a native-speaking category-experienced researcher. I felt the category was too sensitive and the potential for error too great to assign someone with no category experience, nor the nuances copy writers need to produce “case-moving” copy. So I asked, instead, for a native, category-experienced sociologist for the adaptation, plus me (native in Portuguese/English) monitoring the adaptation to insure that the firm's strategic nuances were well embedded. These are real-world ways to control context and construct validity and measurably proving you have.

Finally, for impactful ad copy one needs solidly grounded ways to discriminate across “bilingual” decision processes since no one-size-fits-all “bilingual” exists. Why is because they don’t have identical AA&U and purchase habits by category/brand. In the 50 million US Hispanic market, > 80% is made of the rapidly growing foreign-born market segment while the < 20% that is US-born is growing at the same rate as the the general population. That means, very slowly, plus ad clutter in English makes the 20% far more costly to reach.

We had AA&U data-bases among: (a) foreign-born, Spanish-dependent Hispanics with Latin American based marketing communications category/brand knowledge/awareness; (b) US-born, English-dependent Hispanics with US-based marketing communications category/brand knowledge/awareness; (c) a control group of American counterparts by category. The findings showed that in their media and category/brand/usage habits that, while the differences between US-born Hispanics and their US-born American counterparts were statistically insignificant, those between the foreign-born and their US-born counterparts were statistically highly significant.

The findings are self-evident: When category/brand environments are not identical, one can’t validly compare US-born with any foreign-born in any category.

So, control of content and construct validity are critical to transcultural ad copy development. “Translation” is error laden enough to compromise any findings, conclusions and recommendations for ad copy development. It is more effective to sample “decision process” dependence and category/brand development to develop ad copy. “Monolingual” and “bilingual” if defined colloquially – or in fields with none of the competencies needed to execute “case-moving” marketing communications – are heavily error-laden constructs and render any findings, conclusions and recommendations unreliable, invalid and therefore unusable.

Best,

Dr. A-F