Cultural References in Marketing Copy: Keep, Adapt, or Cut?
A slogan, a seasonal reference, a pop-culture nod — the words might translate without any trouble, but the reference behind them can still mean nothing to the reader on the other side. When I'm working on content translation between English, Turkish, and Arabic, the question I keep coming back to is whether a given reference actually lands with the new audience, or whether it's just filler they'll skim past.
I use a simple three-way framework to make that call: keep it, adapt it, or cut it.
Keep It: Cultural References in Marketing Copy
Some references survive the jump because they're either globally recognized or because the target audience already shares the same context.
"Black Friday" is a clear example. Turkish and Arabic retail marketing both use the English term directly — often written in Latin script even inside otherwise fully Turkish or Arabic copy — rather than translating it into a local equivalent. The name itself has become the recognizable signal, so replacing it with a translated phrase would actually make the campaign less recognizable, not more accessible.
The test I use: would someone reading this in the new language pause and think "I don't get it" — or would they read straight past it without noticing it was ever foreign? If it's the second one, it stays.
Adapt It
A reference can carry the right emotional weight but the wrong specifics — a seasonal expression, a local idiom, a culturally specific comparison. In these cases, the goal isn't a literal translation; it's finding an equivalent that produces the same reaction in the new language.
A couple of real examples from working between English and Turkish:
"Peace of mind" is a staple of English marketing copy, especially for insurance, tech, and service brands. Translated literally, it becomes zihin huzuru, which reads as clinical or academic in Turkish — not something you'd expect in an ad. Turkish copy reaching for the same reassurance tends to use gönül rahatlığı instead ("comfort of the heart"), which carries the same emotional function through a different image entirely.
"Game-changer" doesn't have a single-word or idiomatic equivalent in Turkish. It's often rendered as oyunun kurallarını değiştiren (literally, "something that changes the rules of the game") — a calque that's become common enough in Turkish tech and business writing to read naturally, even though it started as a fairly literal translation.
Going the other direction, Turkish has expressions like kolay gelsin (said to someone who's working, roughly "may it come easily to you") and eline sağlık (said to praise someone's work, literally "health to your hand"). Neither one maps onto a single English phrase. In marketing copy, they usually get replaced with something functionally similar — "we're here to help," "made with care" — rather than translated at all, because a literal version would just confuse an English-speaking reader.
Adapting means asking: what is this reference actually doing for the reader — building trust, adding warmth, creating urgency — and then finding the version of that effect that works in the target language, even if the surface wording changes completely.
Cut It
Sometimes a reference just doesn't have a place in the new version. This usually happens with:
Wordplay or rhyme that only works with the original language's sounds
References tied to a very specific regional context with no local equivalent
Humor that risks landing flat, or being misread as something else entirely
A tagline built on internal rhyme — something like "Save more, stress less" — is a common case. The rhythm and the more/less pairing are doing a lot of the work in English, and neither survives a literal translation into Turkish or Arabic. Trying to preserve the rhyme usually forces awkward word choices just to make the sounds match. The more workable move is to drop the wordplay and state the benefit plainly in the new language, rather than force a rhyme that isn't there to begin with.
A Quick Way to Decide
When I'm reviewing a piece of content and hit a cultural reference, I run through three questions:
Would the target audience recognize this without explanation? → Keep it.
Does the reference exist to create a specific effect (emotion, tone, urgency) rather than to be understood literally? → Adapt it.
Does this only work because of wordplay, rhythm, or a very narrow cultural context? → Cut it, and look for what the copy is trying to achieve instead.
None of this is about being loose with the source text — it's about being precise with the intent behind it. A reference that gets a literal translation but loses its purpose isn't really translated at all.
I work across English, Turkish, and Arabic on business, content, and editing projects. If you're weighing how cultural references in marketing copy should translate into another language, I'm happy to talk through it — drop a comment or send me a message.
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