PART I
In late 2007, my company (along with my partner Evelyn Hale de Perez-Verdia) was hired by an elections office in Florida to inform Hispanic voters about the new voting method. That year all counties in Florida had to switch from voting on a touch screen to a paper ballot where voters had to fill in “the bubble” and insert it into a scanner. It was all about having a paper trail should Florida ever experience a recount like in 2000!
The Supervisor of Elections office obtained three firms to execute this public service announcement. There was the lead/mainstream firm, another to reach out to the Black community, and then us. The lead firm was responsible for drafting the overall message, look, and feel of the outreach campaign. We were then responsible for adjusting materials to cater to the Hispanic community as well as determine targeted areas for face-to-face interaction.
Perhaps to save money the lead firm translated all the materials including public service announcements to be aired on television. In English they prepared a 30-second spot with the Supervisor of Election (SOE), discussing the new changes in voting and to our surprise he did the same piece in Spanish.
The lead firm then delivered to us the Spanish tape to release to our media contacts. Hello!! We were not hired just to push materials to the networks or press; we were there to provide the creative support and advice to properly bring awareness to the Latino community. This included recreating messages that would make sense to Spanish speakers…Transcreation.
Literal translation is effective only when working with technical or medical terminology but not when you are trying to attract a particular audience or bring about attention to an issue. Let alone, this 30-second spot had the SOE speaking in Spanish with a slow, monotone, English accent with a shorter script than the English version. It was horrible!
We wanted to prove a point and immediately conducted a focus group in which they concluded with the same thoughts we had. They were turned off by the accent. They did not remember what the message was about because for about 25 seconds they were thinking that he was trying to pander to Hispanics. My firm decided to trash this tape and start fresh.
The problem some agencies and clients have is that they assume the only way to penetrate the Hispanic market is by translating the original message while at the same time saving money. Unfortunately, if you go that route you will lose. The solution is to start fresh and create content in Spanish first…Transcreate. Secondly, if you don’t speak Spanish don’t push yourself and use phonetically spelled cue cards for the reasons our focus group explained above.
For the Supervisor of Elections office we immediately created 3 scripts to be read by a Spanish-speaking voiceover talent. Instead of using the SOE in the spot, like was done in English, we used graphic images and b-roll footage of a hand filling out a sample ballot and inserting it into the scanner. We made it fun, interactive, and memorable. Our three spots incorporated items that in someway revolved around the Latin culture; food, music and dancing, and fútbol (soccer).
To spare the embarrassment of our client & the lead firm I am not showing the original video that was created. You have to attend one of my Infusion workshops to view it. Otherwise the spots that we ended up creating & that was eventually used can be seen here on this site or on YouTube.
Part II of this post I will share on Monday. It is another example of what not to do, this time in Print. I will also go into further detail about Transcreation.
