In advertising agencies, adaptation is usually looked down upon. Having to do it means that you have no time to develop your own ideas; maybe even that your own ideas aren’t much trusted. With my love for both English and German, though, I have never seen it as a demotion to be asked to do it.

You may have come across one of these multilingually published magazines such as Cosmopolitan. Much of their content is – often quite hastily – translated, typically from some English master copy. And that transpires: albeit perfectly correct, the syntax often has a distinctly alien feel to it. It’s the grammar of another culture.

Whenever I do adaptation work, it is my ambition to eliminate those foreign traces, unless they are part of the message. The trick is, once you have done a rough translation to understand what it’s all about, you download a non-verbal copy of its content to your mind and then write it again from scratch in the target language. It’s a challenge, but it also gives me a flow experience.