Adapting a video for another culture: humor, idioms, visuals and formats

Why an accurate translation can still feel foreign

A translation can be grammatically perfect and still sound like it came from somewhere else. The narrator compares onboarding to a road trip on Route 66, a chart shows prices in dollars and weights in pounds, a hand gesture means something rude in the target market, and the example customer is celebrating Thanksgiving. Each item is small; together they tell viewers the video was not made for them. Cultural adaptation is the job of finding those signals and deciding what to do about each one.

Humor and wordplay

Humor depends on shared references, timing and often on sound. Puns almost never survive, because they rely on two meanings of one word in one language. Sarcasm and understatement read differently across cultures; dry British understatement can come across as genuine criticism elsewhere. Self-deprecating jokes from a founder may sound unprofessional in markets that expect formality from leadership.

The options are to translate the joke and accept it may fall flat, replace it with a local equivalent, or cut it. For a voice track with fixed timing, cutting often works best, because a replacement joke rarely fits the same number of seconds.

Idioms and figurative language

Machine translation has improved at idioms, but it still renders some literally, especially unusual or industry-specific ones (literal idioms sit alongside false friends and register slips in this list of common machine translation errors). A literal idiom is rarely wrong in a way a non-speaker would notice, which is exactly why it slips past reviewers who do not speak the target language.

Gestures, colors and imagery

Visuals cannot be fixed by translation at all. The thumbs-up, the OK sign, beckoning with a finger and showing the soles of the feet carry different meanings in different places. Colors carry associations too: white is linked with mourning in parts of East Asia, while red is associated with luck and celebration in China. Clothing, alcohol, food and how people interact on screen can matter in some markets.

Be careful with generalizations. These associations vary by region, generation and context, and a confident rule found online is often outdated or overstated. Ask a reviewer from the market rather than relying on lists. If a visual problem is serious, the options are to cut or reframe the shot, cover it, or accept that the video is better re-shot for that market.

Units, dates, numbers and currency

Format differences are the easiest to spot and the easiest to get wrong in graphics. A few that come up constantly:

Dates

10/03 is October 3 in the US and 10 March in most of Europe; Chinese and Japanese typically write year, month, day.

Decimals and thousands

1,250.50 in the US is commonly written 1.250,50 in Germany and 1 250,50 in France.

Units

Miles, pounds and Fahrenheit are rare outside the US; most viewers elsewhere expect kilometers, kilograms and Celsius.

Currency

Prices should be local or clearly labeled, and should match what the viewer actually pays.

Time of day

Many countries write times on the 24-hour clock, so 5 pm may read better as 17:00.

In subtitles, check whether number formatting was adapted; translation may or may not do it. No translation engine will turn 50 miles into 80 kilometers, and it should not, because that changes the claim. Decide conversions in the script before voicing.

Examples, names and references

Spoken examples are where a video most often reveals its origin: a sample customer named Brad, a reference to the Super Bowl, tax season in April, a school year that starts in September, a price compared to a coffee at a particular chain. Swap these for neutral or local equivalents when the swap does not change the point. References to real laws, institutions and regulations need extra care, because a local equivalent may not exist or may differ in important ways.

Transcreation: when to rewrite instead of translate

Transcreation means writing new copy that achieves the same effect in the target culture, guided by the source rather than bound to it. It is the right tool for taglines, slogans, calls to action, product names that mean something unfortunate in another language, and any line whose job is emotional rather than informational. It is the wrong tool for instructions, legal text and anything a viewer must act on precisely, where faithful translation matters more than flair.

Transcreated lines need a brief: who the audience is, what the line must make them feel or do, and which words cannot change, such as brand and product names. Ads and explainers are where this comes up most; marketing video translation covers that format.

What AI handles and what it can't

AI is a strong first-draft engine for the raw material of cultural adaptation. Speech recognition and machine translation turn the source into a timed, editable translation quickly, and the translation will often pick a natural phrasing for common idioms. It can't decide which references your audience will recognize, judge whether a joke is appropriate, notice a gesture in the picture, or know that your sample price is wrong for a market. It also cannot change anything in the image.

A person who knows the market should review at least the jokes, idioms, examples, names, numbers and units, calls to action, and anything visible on screen. That review is usually faster on a transcript than on the video itself.

Running a cultural review with mydubly outputs

mydubly produces the translation layer: a voice track in one of 21 languages, SRT and VTT subtitles, and transcripts in both the source and the target language. For cultural adaptation, the two transcripts are the working document. A reviewer reads them side by side and flags lines to adapt. Because mydubly generates the voice from its own translation, editing a downloaded subtitle file does not change the voice track; a spoken line that must change needs a revised source recording, or a decision to use subtitles for that video instead. The picture is never altered, so visual issues stay a job for your editor. The video localization page shows where this step sits in the wider workflow.

Next step: a cultural pass on one video

Pick a video for your first target market, produce the translated transcript, and ask a reviewer from that market to mark every line under the categories above. The pattern of their marks shows which kinds of content in your library travel well and which need adapting every time. Start from the video localization page, and read video translation vs localization if you are still deciding whether the project needs adaptation at all.