Bridging technology and creativity: NMT and GenAI in advertising transcreation

Due to their dramatic improvements, the employment of machine translators constitutes a significant part of our everyday life. Nowadays, systems such as Neural Machine Translation (NMT) and Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) are employed to enhance both productivity and speed. Even if their outputs are becoming increasingly human-like and publishable, post-editing and human aid is still needed mostly in creative fields such as marketing and advertising, where translation is rather called “transcreation”. In these particular fields, such as the food industry, cross-linguistic and cross-cultural conservation of both conative function and creative language is essential. In this thesis, three NMT and GenAI systems (DeepL, Language Weaver, and ChatGPT-4o) will be analysed in relation to their transcreations of 15 pieces of advertising using two different language pairs (English>Italian and English>German). This thesis and its case study aim to show these systems' strengths and weaknesses when performing transcreation in a specific field with specific language pairs based on their raw outputs.