CASE STUDY

MuseumsPartner

Engaging multilingual audiences

MuseumsPartner, a leading producer of international traveling exhibitions, needed museum localization services to effectively reach and engage multilingual visitors, enhancing the experience of their global exhibitions.

Background

MuseumsPartner is a leading logistics provider and producer of international traveling exhibitions that attract millions of people worldwide. Drawing on their extensive experience working with renowned museums, they offer everything from project management and exhibition planning to art logistics. Since 2021, Multilingual Connections has worked with MuseumsPartner to help engage and grow multilingual audiences through translation, subtitling, and transcreation of museum exhibits.

Challenge

The California Science Center (CSC) is an organization that values inclusion and accessibility. Given their Los Angeles location, they wanted to ensure all exhibitions were accessible to both English and Spanish speakers. MuseumsPartner was looking to adapt the traveling exhibition “Angkor: the Lost Empire of Cambodia,” which explores the arts and artifacts of ancient Angkor through the lens of science. MuseumsPartner’s challenge involved adapting their existing exhibition for the CSC’s visitors through translation, subtitling, and creative transcreation services.

"Our goal was to get a good translation for the audience of our clients. In this case [we required] the Spanish that is spoken in the area of LA...the service was on top! The answers were very quick and it was a good collaboration."

Marie Eckert | Head of Exhibition Management, MUSEUMSPARTNER

Solution

At Multilingual Connections, each project is unique and requires a custom-designed team to accommodate client goals. For this project, they built a team of linguists with deep cultural and linguistic understanding of the subject matter, target language, and audience. Specific requirements included:

● Working within character limits required by exhibit guidelines

● Creating Spanish subtitles for films on display

● Translating text for exhibit panels

● Providing transcreation, the creative linguistic and cultural adaption of text from one language into another

Translation & Transcreation

The translation process required creative solutions in order to successfully adapt the Angkor exhibition to the CSC’s voice while maintaining respect for the presentation’s aesthetic. Transcreation is the creative process of reimagining original content so that it will be received both linguistically and culturally in another language. Multilingual Connections’ transcreation approach ensured that the new content maintained the client’s voice, tone, and style, and resonated with the target audience.

Because text expands in volume when translated from English to Spanish, Multilingual Connections’ linguists also ensured that source messaging was expressed naturally but succinctly, while still meeting character limitations of object labels and text in panels and interactive materials.

Results

Multilingual Connections found creative workarounds for interactives that required linguistic flexibility. For example, one game challenged visitors to correctly order “broken” phrases on ancient tablets into “inscriptions” that made sense. Because the syntax in English and Spanish differs, our translators ensured the Spanish translation would work when “broken up” and reordered, as it works in the English version.

Multilingual Connections’ project managers were provided with photographs and contextual information. Linguists ensured that deliverables were not only culturally nuanced for the CSC audience, but that they fully aligned with the greater context of what visitors would experience.

"The service was on top! The answers were very quick and it was a good collaboration!"

Marie Eckert

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