Why I Am An Underrated Fashion Professional Pt.2
From Net-A-Porter to MATCHESFASHION, the evolution of the online luxury retailers
Here is the second instalment of Why I Am An Underrated Fashion Professional, a column I created to talk about my job and experience while taking you through the behind-the-scenes of an unknown side of the fashion industry. In the first instalment, I talked you through my first job as a Product Writer at Mytheresa. In this new one, I went directly to 2017 and 2018, when I worked at Net-A-Porter and MATCHESFASHION to show you the evolution of online luxury retailers.
I don’t know of any other fashion professionals working for online luxury retailers, but in my case, I spent time browsing through competitors’ sites. It was obviously for work reasons, but most importantly, it was for my own pleasure. In the 2010s, some retailers produced beautiful editorials with appealing stories and interviews that I devoured religiously. Net-A-Porter was a pioneer with The Edit, now known as Porter, which was translated into French, German, Italian, and Chinese at the time. The fact I freelanced there for a month and a half worsened my obsession with luxury online retailers with solid fashion journalism and beautiful editorials. You don’t know my surprise when I discovered, browsing NAP’s site to write this story, that they scrapped Porter from the French, German and Italian sites. Now, it only exists in English. I don’t know if it happened as a consequence of the pandemic, but generally, when online retailers want to cut some budget, the localisation department is often among the first ones to suffer from restructuring. I know firsthand because I experienced it.
But let’s go back to NAP. My month and a half there was fantastic because it didn’t feel like I was translating but writing because the company valued something called transcreation:
A term coined from the words "translation" and "creation", and a concept used in the field of translation studies to describe the process of adapting a message from one language to another, while maintaining its intent, style, tone, and context. A successfully transcreated message evokes the same emotions and carries the same implications in the target language as it does in the source language. It is related to the concept of localization, which similarly involves comprehensively adapting a translated text for the target audience. Transcreation highlights the translator's creative role. Unlike many other forms of translation, transcreation also often involves adapting not only words, but video and images to the target audience.
Transcreation theory was first developed in the field of literary translation, and began to be adapted for use global marketing and advertising in the early 21st century. The transcreation approach is also heavily used today in the translation of video games and mobile apps.
The concept of transcreation emphasizes the translator's independent creative role. In the context of marketing, the professional translators engaging in transcreation are often referred to as "copywriters" or "copyeditors", or alternatively as "transcreators".
Source Wikipedia
As you see, transcreation seems relatively new, but it wasn’t for me. Before my Erasmus in Bologna, I did something called classe préparatoire - a two-year type of cram school preparing for the Grandes Écoles (the equivalent of your British Oxbridge) in which studies were focused on Humanities. I majored in languages, so I spent 9 and 6 hours a week translating excerpts of classics from Italian and American literature. I clearly remember my Italian and English teachers insisting on reading first to understand the cultural context and then translating with that in mind. The goal was for the text to sound just like a French classic, yet with the cultural specificities clear enough for the reader to understand the historical, societal, and political context during which the literary work was published. They didn’t call it transcreation at the time, but it was. That’s why working at NAP felt very familiar.
An example of transcreation
I transcreated this story of Miranda Kerr by writer and editor Sanjiv Bhattacharya for The Edit. It is what they still call today a Cover Story, and the Australian model and businesswoman was the cover girl. So the title reflected it: Cover Up Girl. But how do you translate it into French? The term “cover girl” in French doesn’t exist and, consequently, is untranslatable. And so is the expression “cover-up.” The story was published on September 2nd, and the pictures screamed autumn and layering; meanwhile, in the interview, Miranda Kerr spoke about how she navigated her career as a model and businesswoman - she has an organic skincare brand called Kora Organics - her life as a wife, and motherhood. So in French, I chose to call the piece Leçons de transition, which roughly translates to Transition lessons to reflect the seasonal transition and Miranda Kerr’s transitions from one role to another.
Side note: When I worked on that piece, I giggled because you could tell the writer was a little bit fed up interviewing her, as it was his second time. As a transcreator, finding these moments of honesty between the lines is fun, especially on an e-commerce site where you'd least expect it because the main goal is to sell products. So here’s a little excerpt:
‘A devout Christian with a New Age twist, she’s at home with the kind of non-denominational spirituality for which her adopted home of California is known. She is fluent in the language of “cleansing” and “vibration”, and uses a lot of words I’ve never heard before, like noni and ylang-ylang. There’s no stopping her. Every chance she gets, she brings our conversation back to Kora.’
My experience at Net-A-Porter only lasted a month and a half, but I grew greatly within such a short time frame because I was in a company that valued localisation. So by the time I started working at MATCHESFASHION in 2018, I had evolved, and so did the online luxury landscape. I had been eyeing MATCHESFASHION for a while because of their editorials - which have unfortunately disappeared in all languages, English included - and journalistic stance gave an edgier idea of fashion and style. I was hired there as a Sub-Editor for the French market, and if you are wondering what that role consists in, Indeed, the listing jobs site gave it the below definition:
Sub-editors play a vital role in ensuring that a publication maintains consistently high standards of grammar, spelling and readability while adhering to specific style, tone and formatting rules.
I like that Indeed emphasised that a Sub-Editor’s role is v-i-t-a-l. Too bad, though, the description only applies to a monolingual sub-editor. Seeing such a description reinforces the point of that column: multilingual writers, copywriters, editors, sub-editors, and translators are underrated. That is precisely why I wrote in my first instalment that our work “is much more than checking grammar and syntax.” As you have seen above, no language can be translated literally. There are expressions, concepts, and idioms specific to a country’s culture. Now, you may understand better why the experience at NAP was crucial for my role at MATCHESFASHION.
Unlike NAP, MF worked with a translation agency, and as a Sub-Editor, one of my main tasks consisted of correcting the product descriptions sent by the translation agency. This new process was fascinating because it made me understand that specialised translators exist for a reason. The agency worked with a pool of freelancers, and it was clear who was familiar with fashion vocabulary, history, and designers and who was not. For that reason, we had weekly meetings with the translation agency and gave feedback to their project managers and coordinators about the quality of the translations, updating them with a lexicon around brands’ names, materials, clothing and accessories names and definitions. We were essentially a fashion encyclopedia.
MATCHESFASHION was translated into French, Korean, and Japanese - and as I write this, I just discovered the Korean and Japanese sites were gone, grim times for us translators. I mention this because an e-commerce translated into x languages signals either the interest of a company to expand into an area of the world or a clientele coming from x markets buying on the site in English despite no price conversion, enormous taxes, and high shipping costs. Translating the site then isn’t just appealing to the customers because it is in their mother tongue, but it directly impacts their user experience and spending power: who wants to pay double or triple the shipping costs AND customs when they are already spending a hefty lot? The translation of a site implies behind-the-scenes; the company will look into hiring PR, personal shoppers, finding local couriers, and a marketing team from the regions they want to expand into, etc. So again, translation and transcreation aren’t to be taken lightly.
In the almost three years I was there, the fashion world expanded, and new categories arrived at MF: fine jewellery, homeware and bridal. They all overlap with fashion as the industry is leaning increasingly towards covering all aspects of life, which means the sub-editor must adapt constantly. And adapt, I did. In my team, I became the fine jewellery specialist. Months before fine jewellery dropped on MF, with a colleague from the copy team, I extensively researched the history of jewellery, the different types of gold, what a karat was, what gold plated exactly meant, the variety of gem settings, the different types of precious gemstones, etc. We then put together a document our team could refer to at any time and would update if needed. As part of the French team, I translated parts of the document about fine jewellery techniques and lexicon. I mentioned it in the first instalment: building relationships with buyers in our job is essential. And that’s what we did with the fine jewellery buyer. It is one thing to gather information and make a presentation, but it is another one to have a buyer explaining to you the inner workings of an industry adjacent to fashion, yet that couldn’t be so different from it.
See, as the fashion industry evolves, so we are.
I hope you enjoyed this second instalment. I am telling about my experience, but if you work in the fashion industry and feel your work is underrated, feel free to contact me. I’d be more than happy to expand this column to other areas of fashion that are lesser known.
Arrivederci
Unfortunately, unless you are a creative director, or a celebrity stylist, all the other jobs in fashion are in one way or another, underrated and generally misunderstood. 😅