Transcreation of product descriptions of sports, exercise and educational games marketed by Megaform (July 2018)

The Belgian company Megaform markets innovative educational sports and exercise games. I translated the company’s entire online catalogue for Megaform’s marketing department.

The customer knew that as a qualified translator specialising in sport and sports games with a Masters in Didactics, I was the perfect man for the job. And by happy coincidence, just a few weeks previously, I had completed the Texterclub’s Texten 1 und 2 copywriting course in Germany and was now a certified advertising copywriter.

The seminar I had taken was led by the experienced technical author and copywriter Stefan Gottschling, who had given the participants access to his invaluable Copywriter’s Toolkit. Stefan Gottschling’s powerful copywriting tools are used to optimise the copywriting process and construct a series of selling points. I put these tools to good use in the Megaform project, creating convincing and persuasive product descriptions.

The final part of the process was my complete reworking of the 30,000 words to produce the final copy. Prior to that, as a creative translator I had set myself the task of ensuring my copy read in German as if it was the original text – or ideally, even better than the original text. Then I set the bar even higher: every word had to sound just right, every selling point had to hit the bull’s eye.

Now, whether I’m writing copy or translating creatively, whenever I’m dealing with sales- and image-oriented text, I put the sophisticated tools I acquired from the Texterclub to good use. I no longer need to apply this process in several stages: writing persuasive sales copy is now second nature to me.

I am particularly pleased that my long-standing customer Megaform was the first company to benefit from my new skills. The result? The marketing department was able to upload German product descriptions that read as if they’d been written from scratch in German.