Overview
The Marketing Store is a global customer engagement agency, with offices in London, Chicago, Hong Kong, Paris and Toronto. They came to us for one of its most visible projects: a series of children’s books for McDonald’s Happy Meal Readers, aimed at getting kids reading across more than 100 markets.
Each book had to work in forty languages and read naturally in every one. The charm, humour and tone had to survive the journey, so a child in any market would feel the same connection to the characters, all delivered against tight print deadlines.
Solution
Transcreating a children’s book is harder than it looks. Jokes, rhythm and warmth rarely survive a literal translation. Our job was to keep every book funny and heartfelt in forty languages, at pace, and at the scale a global rollout demands.
- Teams who write for children
We recruited 120 linguists in two weeks and built forty transcreation teams, each with real experience in children’s literature. That specialist feel for tone, humour and rhythm is what let each book keep its charm in every market.
- Run at scale, consistently
We managed the whole process inside TMS’s own localisation system, coordinating 120 linguists across forty languages for every book. Working in one place kept quality and tone consistent, market to market, book to book.
- Faster every round
We paired expert linguists with translation technology and our own client portal to strip out admin and speed up production. Over the project we brought delivery down from five working days per book to three, with no loss of quality.