Shady Ships

We worked with Ship It Zero to launch a transcreated video campaign, exposing the untold environmental and public health impacts of retail companies’ reliance on fossil-fueled maritime shipping.

Project Name

Shady Ships

Client

Ship It Zero

Client Location

USA

Client website

Services

Translation | Transcription | Subtitling | In Context Review

Content Type

Marketing

Source Language

English (US)

Target Language

Spanish (US)

The Challenge

Ship It Zero is a campaign built to spread awareness around transoceanic cargo ships polluting the oceans. While they had their campaign materials ready to launch in English, they needed a Spanish version that would preserve the original intent, context, emotion, and tone of their campaign video. The biggest challenge was transadapting the cheeky connotations and play on words portrayed/found in the original English version.

How
Localipsum
Helped

Localipsum stepped in not only to translate the video, but to bring transcreation to this project and ensure each word is translated with the right creativity and cultural knowledge to resonate with audiences.

Though challenging,
we were successfully able to

Transcreate the report name, “Shady Ships,” into Spanish while transmitting the same idea in Spanish. Collaborating effectively with our clients to find a word that replicates “shady” in this context, and offering additional options to the client that re-translated to “murky waters”. The final decision was taken as true partners!
Create the Spanish version of the campaign name, “Ship It Zero”, so it still made sense to Spanish viewers.
Keep phrases short and powerful, even though Spanish is generally 25-30% longer than English. Thanks to our training in subtitle creation for the Hollywood industry and knowledge of character limits in social media content, we were able to ensure each transcreated line would fit on screen for optimal impact. It’s all about saying more with less!

Plus, we always pay attention to every small detail

For example, the translation looked great when we delivered it to the client for the video to be created. Upon our final review of the video, our hawk eyes caught that the shipping containers were piled up in an order that would cause alliteration in “Target y IKEA.” This is an easy fix for any written form but we knew it would cause trouble for the voiceover talent. We simply asked our client to do their magic and invert the containers to show the IKEA one first in the video. Done and done!
We are extremely proud of the final piece we collaborated on. Check out the English and Spanish versions below.

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