The terms “slogan” and “tagline” are often used as synonyms, and they are in fact very similar. If you want to make a distinction you might say that slogans go with specific advertising campaigns and are therefore more short-lived, while taglines are an identifiable phrase for a brand and therefore have a much longer lifecycle. But mostly, the distinction is not terribly useful, and what they certainly have in common is the difficulties they pose to the translator.

They are short phrases expressing a concept or a claim that, when successful, will resonate with the reader and create an emotion, and a connection. They are meant to help consumers to remember the brand and distinguish it from the competition. As such they have to be catchy, and stand  out, be memorable, perhaps witty, or outrageous, but certainly original.

It has been said that the best slogans come about when novelty co-exists with familiarity, as this encourages the recipient to compare what is known with what is new, resulting in a twist, a surprise effect. Phonetic properties and rhythm are also important. Various techniques or rhetorical devices, such as prosody (alliteration, assonance, rhyme), metaphor, or reference to a standard phrase can be useful, too. As can a phrase from another language (“Fortschritt durch Technik” in English, or “Nespresso What Else” in German-speaking countries).

GetYourGuide, a booking platform for unforgettable travel experiences, give an insight on their website into how their language teams came up with memorable slogans in various languages for their new English slogan “Love where you’re going”. Their Spanish language specialist explains why “Ama donde vas” or “Enamórate de donde vas” just would not work. The same is clearly true for German – “Liebe wohin du gehst” would be most peculiar. The GetyourGide German teams says that their initial idea “Aus Liebe zum Reisen” was not original – it had already been taken by a supermarket chain. So that went out of the window. In the end they went for “Aus Liebe zum Entdecken” (For the love of discovery). The Dutch chose “Je volgende reis is je beste” – Your next trip is your best. From these examples you can see just how free their transcreations are. Proving perhaps also that when you transcreate a slogan for your own company you have the advantage of knowing the background, the purpose, etc., and being able to bounce your ideas off other colleagues. (You can see their discussion here: https://inside.getyourguide.com/blog/2019/7/2/localization-creating-a-memorable-slogan)

In other cases, one is surprised just how literal translated slogans can be. I came across Samsung’s “Unfold your world” for their foldable Galaxy Z this afternoon, and found to my astonishment that German is using “Entfalte deine Welt” and French: “Dépliez votre monde”. Wow, those guys were lucky. Even DeepL gets that right.

When it comes to slogans the first question is whether it is actually sensible, necessary, or desirable to come up with translations. So much advertising language these days is left in English, particularly in countries like Switzerland, Germany, Sweden and the Netherlands. Given the difficulties and the risks of translating clever slogans, one can easily understand why some companies with a global reach prefer to take the easy route and go with the English. This gives them more control, and is of course much quicker and more cost-effective. And it appears that many “natives” in any case find English “more attractive” or more positive when it comes to communication and advertisements in particular. And since there is no doubt that English works well with slogans, I guess most of us prefer a snappy English phrase to a clunky Spanish or German one.

At Alpha we have sometimes spent many (wo)man hours trying to come up with translations, experimenting with various idea, comparing, checking, laughing, crying, waiting for inspiration … only to then be told by the client: “Oh don’t worry, we don’t need that, it’s going to stay in English”. We were, well – not pleased! All that time wasted.

Creating slogans is not as a general rule quick. It involves – or should involve – a team of people, and ideally someone from the client side as well. Just think: It may have taken weeks for the English copywriters to come up with the initial ideas,  collecting feedback, trying out suggestions, bouncing them off against others, evaluating their emotional impact and their persuasive power, checking there were no infringements or other issues, etc.

It would be wrong therefore to assume that translating a slogan can be done in the time it takes to translate 5 or 6 words! If you then think of having to go through this in 20 languages it is obvious why you might throw in the towel and decide that multiple adaptations would simply involve too much effort and cost. And you cannot always be sure that the effort is appreciated, or will work. And yet, there is evidence to show that culturally adapted slogans have a greater appeal for consumers and are more persuasive. That is certainly true when the English is not totally straightforward and difficult to understand, or contains a pun that is too American or too British. There are many anecdotes about Germans misunderstanding certain slogans, either being totally baffled, or misunderstanding the intended meaning, as in Lufthansa’s “There’s no better way to fly” – which some took to refer to being given the sack! Or “Coffee To Go”, where consumers assumed the coffee came from Togo.

It has been found that certain products, such as luxury cosmetics, or fashion are associated more with sophistication and a modern feel when English is used, but that for other products, consumers prefer local adaptations. That is true, for example, for household products.

Transcreating slogans and taglines is certainly not easy. One added complication is that these days, much of what gets sent to us for translation is extracted from a content management system, without context. It comes to us as an “anonymous string” with nothing to mark it out as a special case that needs “priority” treatment.

“Let the platform do the work” was one of these. It turned up, innocuously, in a product description that would be published on the webpage of an IT company. Over subsequent months it became clear that this wasn’t just a one off, as it kept turning up in various commutations: “Let the platform identify risk accounts”, “Let the platform tell you about accounts”, “Let the platform run the campaign”, “Let the platform create the forecasts”, etc. etc. And while this works absolutely fine in English, it created endless headaches for translation into German, mainly because the nice-and-easy construction with “Let …” just did not lend itself for rendition into German (“Überlassen Sie es der Plattform, die Arbeit zu tun”) is just terribly awkward. It has no rhythm, no melody, and is totally unmemorable. You might get away using it once, but when it starts cropping up everywhere – oh dear, oh dear. English definitely has the advantage over German that it is short and uncomplicated, and in the now widely popular imperative form it does not need a pronoun, while German (when using the polite form of address) does. So anything like “Explore our sale”, “Discover our latest collection”, once translated into German, just loses its light touch and becomes much more of an imperative.

Another challenge we recently had was with one of our clients who makes premium household appliances. The English original, referring to a coffee machine, was “You’re only a touch away from mastery”, which was not as easy as it might look, and took us a while to figure out. Yet more prove that other languages just do not have the brevity and simplicity of English. In comparison, our sentences come out heavier and long-winded, and verbs often need objects when the English equivalents don’t. Nor do German or the Romance languages have the many monosyllabic words (that can often function both as nouns and as verbs) of English. “Touch” in German is “Berührung” as a noun, or “berühren”, “anfassen” as a verb.

Our initial instinct was recommending to our client they might wish to leave this in English – but for them that was not an option.

In the event, this was only the tip of the iceberg: a few weeks later this very same tagline turned up again, but now in the company of two others – with all three appearing on a single page: touch – twist – push. They clearly had to work as a trio:

• You’re only a touch away from mastery (espresso machine)
• You’re only a twist away from mastery (cooking oven)
• You’re only a push away from mastery (juicer)

As you can see, Dutch is the lucky one here, being able to use “touch”, “draii” and “druck” as equivalents for the English, in the same, concise way as the English; and “meesterschap” is obviously the equivalent of “mastery”. French feels the need to add the qualifying adjective “simple”, but luckily does have near-equivalents for the nouns. But in French the concept of “mastery” gets lost. Our French team did have it in, initially (“Une simple touche suffit pour maîtriser à la perfection”, but this was subsequently discarded as being too long and not very elegant. In German too, we could not see a way of including “Meisterschaft” or “Beherrschung”. “Sie sind nur eine Berührung weit weg von der Meisterschaft” simply does not cut it, nor does “Nur eine Handbewegung entfernt …”. While consulting lists of synonyms often helps, sadly it didn’t in this case. “push” and “touch” are very similar in German and can be “drücken” or “pressen” – but you need to specify what (Taste, Knopf). The two do not work well when seen together and are just a bit too mundane, not alluring or exciting. And because we cannot get in that endearing “personable” feel of the English source, Dutch, French and German are all rather more abstract – and less inviting. Only Spanish manages to get a bit more personal – but I am not sure the solution is particularly pleasing, as it gets too much into the detail.

And if getting to this point was time-consuming and hard, I now fear that more challenges might be in store. I can image phrases where touch etc. is replaced by “turn”, “swipe”, “step”, “moment” … All these work wonderfully well with the English construction, of course.

To conclude I would say to clients: Please always highlight and draw our attention to any phrases that you will be using as taglines, possibly in different contexts, and with small variations. Also alert us to any essential points your tagline needs to bring out, unless of course this is completely obvious. And, if you have used the tagline elsewhere (and we were not involved), or if it needs to complement and fit in with a previous or parallel tagline, tell us! Finally, if you have decided your slogan or tagline will work successfully in English in a number of other cultures too, discuss this with us.