Beyond Storytelling : Translation Is not the Goal. Adaptation Is.
There is one request I have received countless times throughout my career in bilingual communication: "Can you translate this into English?" For a long time, I believed that was exactly what I was doing. Once the facts had been validated and the message approved, my role appeared relatively straightforward. I simply had to move the content from one language to another while remaining faithful to the original text.
Experience, however, taught me that communication is rarely that simple.
The more I worked on international campaigns, the more I realized that the quality of a communication effort is not determined by how accurately words are translated, but by how effectively meaning is preserved. A message can be linguistically flawless and still fail to reach its audience because understanding does not depend on language alone. It depends on context, expectations, cultural references, and the way people interpret the world around them. That realization fundamentally changed the way I approached multilingual communication.
Why Adaptation Matters More Than Translation
Translation and adaptation are often used interchangeably, yet they serve different purposes. Translation ensures that words remain faithful to the original message. Adaptation ensures that the message remains meaningful to the audience receiving it. I experienced this first-hand while working on a communication campaign around a community issue in Nigeria. The press release had already been finalized in English, and at first glance there seemed to be no reason to produce another version. Both our international media contacts and the local journalists spoke English, and the information itself remained exactly the same. The obvious assumption was that one document would be enough. It wasn't.
As we prepared our media outreach, it became clear that the version written for international media would not resonate with local journalists. International reporters needed broader context, legal background and explanations that would help readers unfamiliar with the issue understand why the case mattered. Local journalists, on the other hand, already understood the context. They needed a message that was more direct, more immediate and more closely connected to the realities of the communities affected.
The facts never changed. The tone did. And that made all the difference. It reminded me that communicators do not adapt messages because audiences speak different languages. They adapt them because audiences interpret the same language differently.
Adapting Means Understanding Before Writing
That experience completely changed the way I approached multilingual communication. I stopped asking whether a translation was accurate and started asking whether it was appropriate for the people who would read it.
The objective was no longer to reproduce every sentence, but to preserve the intention behind the message while allowing it to exist naturally in another cultural context. The more I encountered these situations, the more I understood that successful communication begins with understanding people rather than translating content. Before choosing the right words, communicators must first understand who they are speaking to and what their audience needs to connect with the message.
Adaptation Is a Strategic Communication Skill
This is why I believe adaptation deserves to be recognized as a strategic communication skill rather than a linguistic exercise. Just as communication itself begins long before the publication of a press release, adaptation begins long before the first sentence is translated. It starts by identifying the audience, understanding its context, and anticipating the questions, assumptions and sensitivities that will shape how the message is received.
In many ways, adaptation reflects the very essence of strategic communication. It requires research, empathy, critical thinking and collaboration. It asks communicators to move beyond language and consider the broader environment in which communication takes place. Only then can they produce messages that remain faithful to their original intention while becoming genuinely meaningful to those who receive them.
From Translating Words to Adapting Meaning
Looking back, one lesson has remained constant throughout my experience in multilingual communication: language alone is never enough. Translation allows information to cross linguistic borders. Adaptation allows meaning to cross cultural ones. The Nigeria campaign reminded me that the greatest communication challenge is rarely language itself, but the assumption that people who speak the same language will automatically interpret the same message in the same way. As communicators, our responsibility is therefore not simply to translate messages, but to adapt them so that their intention remains intact, regardless of who receives them.