Creative translations complete the collection for Panini’s product launches

25 Aug 2021

To ensure the successful launch of a new sticker album or trading card collection for international markets, professional and creative translation is essential.

Panini is the world leader in the published collector sector and the name behind the iconic football stickers which have been a firm fixture in playgrounds around the world for decades. The company publishes up to 21 sticker albums and trading card collections a year, both in the UK and overseas.

Panini first enlisted Intonation’s expertise in 2014 to undertake a range of projects translating Italian and Spanish to English. These included the rules leaflet for the Invizimals game, sticker album text for Disney Violetta, Slugterra, and Barbie, and text for the Abatons sticker album and website.

Much of Panini’s new material is written in Spanish or Italian so the company relies on the mother tongue translators at Intonation to not only reproduce the material in English but to retain the nuances and tone of the source text.

The Panini Group, which was founded in 1961, has its head office in Italy and in 2016 sales exceeded 631 million Euros. Jessica Bell, Senior Marketing Executive for Panini UK said working with Intonation was straightforward.

“The process of liaising with Intonation was easy and worked well. We would always send as much background and reference material as possible, to help the translators get a feel for the characters or brand,” said Jessica.

“All of the projects Intonation worked on were for collections launching here in the UK. They did a professional and thorough job and the team played a pivotal role in the launch process,” Jessica added.

Rachael Warburton, Intonation’s General Manager believes that these projects straddle the translation-transcreation line

Our work for Panini was all about ensuring the voice and tone of the text connects with the target audience which, in this case, is children. However, accuracy was – as always – paramount.

Transcreation is one of the specialist services we offer to clients in the advertising or marketing sectors. Working on these projects for Panini was a great creative challenge and one which our talented translators undertook with flair.