The Job
As a professional writer, I have a handful of favorite fields and several areas of success. Where these overlap, you’ll find my best client work—satisfying, uniquely suited to my skill set, hard to source elsewhere (I’ve been told). I’ve already written about the exciting stuff I do for the AI-based paperwork automation company Applica. Landing in a nearby sweet spot is my English copywriting for Polish companies specializing in natural skincare. This post delves into this type of work and this genre of strategic writing.
The Category
When I say I work for clients in the natural skincare category, I’m already demonstrating the way translation requires compromise. In Polish, the term is kosmetyki, but the cognate cosmetics tends to bring lipstick to mind for an English speaker, not shampoo. A more accurate category descriptor is personal care—which, in addition to skincare, also includes haircare, grooming products, and color cosmetics. However, in the absence of a beauty-and-health context or a consumer-goods context, the term personal care is opaque and perhaps even misleading. I specialize in personal care writing—who would guess this means face cream and not self-help? Not me, and I’m the specialist! Why, then, do I say skincare, when it so obviously omits hair and make-up? In my view, it’s the least bad compromise. (Incidentally, you might be surprised to discover just how often least bad defines the goal in my line of work!) So skincare it is, imperfect but sufficiently meaningful, unless the context allows or outright requires personal care.
It is tempting to say that when there is this much confusion about what to call a category, you can bet there’s even more confusion about how best to describe everything it contains.
Things get more convoluted when you consider that my largest two clients have not just skincare and haircare in their portfolios, but also items like scented candles and products for cleaning the home. And while window spray and dish soap may seem far removed from eye cream and leave-in conditioner, they sure make sense next to the hand soap, especially the liquid kind. In fact, personal care and home care formulas seem well-suited to sharing production schemes and distribution channels. So it’s really just marketing them under the same brand that may strike some people as unusual, because of the ways most of us like our personal care wholesome and our cleaning products ferocious—but when the combined brand story is built on a shared caregiver archetype, this potential contradiction falls away.
The Gigs
My long-time clients include Sylveco and Yope, two fast-growing, privately owned Polish companies specializing in natural skincare, haircare, and home care products. In the past half-decade alone, I have probably spent one thousand hours creating English versions of Polish product names and labels, ingredient and range descriptions, and general marketing copy. New work comes in with no regularity, because NPD schedules and export needs in this sector (as in most) fluctuate considerably.
A marriage of strategic and creative writing, the work invariably puts me in a state of heightened sensitivity to all things wellness- and beauty-related. And because harmonious tonality, cohesive structure, and consistent vocabulary all benefit from sustained attention—I prefer when more work collects, as opposed to the one-off approach, which doesn’t exactly facilitate deep concentration. (This was not the case a decade ago: I used to struggle considerably with writer’s block and overwhelm syndrome. The bigger the project on my plate, the more anxiety I suffered. It’s good to be on the other side of that crossing.)
The Tone
The language of consumer product packaging tends to combine news-headline expediency with the clarity of a high-school textbook’s homework instructions. Tonality can range from serious to wildly cheeky, but in marketing both gravitas and humor serve at the pleasure of friendly pragmatism. Style-wise, writers impart their own voice to their writing more than I once imagined, even as I was already a junior writer myself. Like a person’s walk or way of talking, a writer’s style can be said to simply be what it is. (In all disciplines, some of us have a knack for impersonating others, but writing “in the style of” is usually not the business writer’s best material.)
When I write about wellness and beauty, I aim for a main course of persuasiveness with a side of soft seduction. I focus on the functional benefits of natural substances to address the emotional needs they help answer. An ingredient’s anti-oxidant properties are as important as the protective and anti-aging powers they bestow. I am careful to make complicated ideas accessible, but I don’t like to oversimplify things. I’m convinced that thoughtful consumers make thoughtful readers—and people who reach for natural skincare fit the bill.
As for humor, I veer on the dead-serious side of things, softening the message not with pops of comedy but through sonorous word choice and melodious flow. For some clients this is a perfect match: earnest descriptions with a pleasant ring. But some clients love their irreverent messaging, and then my English communication skews more careful than the bold Polish originals. Most of the time, the client comes around: humor is tough to translate across cultures and its power to offend is a liability. I’m careful for a reason—but I’m all for translating those jokes that do work (many don’t).
The Rules
The up-front questions are essential. British or American? Sub-headings in sentence or title case? How do we (do we?) capitalize the brand name? What are the permitted character count ranges for each section? Yes or no on the Oxford comma? Some clients are ready with answers, others defer to you. Either way, consistent deployment of the agreed-upon preferences is a must. And a feat, because when you’re juggling several gigs, you sometimes forget to switch (especially between those pesky UK/US pairs like ageing-aging or moisturise-moisturize). That I personally use US English, the Oxford comma, plenty of title case, em-dashes with no spaces, and traditional proper noun capitalization rules does not mean I can’t deftly produce writing with all the settings flipped. It does, however, mean that any notes I include with the writing won’t match the proposed copy. This is exactly as it should be.
English punctuation is a much more exact science than many Poles suppose. Commas follow English comma placement rules, which are blissfully reasonable. Both commas and periods always go inside closing quotation marks, while question marks and exclamation points will fall on the outside whenever they’re not part of what’s being quoted. Titles deploy title case, a feature absent from Polish. Colons sometimes precede a sentence-initial capital. Emphasis is indicated by use of italics, as are some other significant things. Exclamation points and ellipses are used far less than in Polish. On and on, the list goes, and these days I could probably reproduce it from memory. (Not so with the Polish rules: here I need the occasional bit of help from an online resource.)
Staying within the bounds of what’s allowed by law is a must. Different regions have different regulations. In the EU, for example, there is lots of freedom to communicate the ways a formula might “alleviate redness,” “leave hair healthy-looking,” or “defer signs of aging.” Strictest of all is the US, and some adaptations bound for the North American market must follow rigid rules irrelevant to the originals. Those are best constructed from scratch, not just in a different human language but also in a different legal one.
Consistency is of tremendous importance. I mentioned adhering to certain basic stylistic assumptions that determine spelling, punctuation, text length, and the like. Sticking to predictable narrative structures is just as important. If there’s a skincare range that came out last year and the English writing followed a problem–formulation–benefit trajectory, the latest new product better do the same, even if your recent batch of work for this client followed a different pattern—and even if the Polish originals coming in aren’t as consistent as they, too, ought to be (it happens). Use of rhetorical questions, quippy asides, and noteworthy metaphor is also best placed and paced consistently. Alertness is a desirable quality in the long-haul copywriter, and so is having one of those controlling personality types people are always griping about.
The FAQs
The pull to look under the hood of my professional life is not my only reason for writing this post. Another concerns setting some things straight—namely those that require the most explaining as I deliver English adaptations of Polish copy to clients based in Poland.
Translatorial evergreens, I could call them. Many are great examples of the way some similar sounding words in two languages are really “false friends”—historically related or non-related terms that misleadingly suggest semantic equivalence. Even close cognates (cognates are words that share a single linguistic origin) aren’t typically used in all the same ways, and occasionally cognates are not close at all, but mean vastly different things in two different languages. Here is a sampler of some common linguistic quandaries that keep coming up in my work.
The Polish delikatny, though closely related to delicate, is invariably better translated as gentle, mild, or non-irritating (when it refers to a substance that acts gently; for denoting skin type sensitive is the answer).
Polish clients invariably dislike such expressions as promotes hair growth, promotes cellular repair, and promotes a healthy glow. I fight for fair use of this verb repeatedly, but repeatedly I wind up swapping in something else, such is the power of the Polish cognate’s connection to bullish marketing. Nevertheless, I want to make clear that to promote a result is to speed it along, facilitate it, make it better, or help it happen. Let’s try to keep a good word in the mix.
Polish product copy sounds good when you call a thing unique or when you describe an ingredient as top-grade or top-quality. The English equivalents, however, come on too strong—low in meaning, high in those hard-sell qualities best avoided.
A formula is great at soothing irritation—in the singular. The Polish cognate-based plural—podrażnienia—has clients adding an unnecessary plural marker to the English copy.
Apply is a neat, elegant word for getting some product onto the face, hands, hair, or body. It beats many others, including smear, spread, and rub in, all of which sound rather awful.
There’s an interesting discrepancy in the way the Polish terms orientalny, egzotyczny, and tropikalny map onto the English oriental, exotic, and tropical. Orientalny is freely used in Polish because it (still?) lacks the colonialist stigma that has made oriental somewhat toxic. Swapping in exotic, however, takes a bit of explaining, because the Polish egzotyczny connotes coconuts and palm trees, not, say, patchouli and birds of paradise. That English has tropical to convey this very vibe is not really an argument, since the aforementioned cognate in Polish also means the same thing. This issue comes up a lot with regard to product names and fragrance descriptions.
The smell of a thing just isn’t as beautiful-sounding as its scent, fragrance, or aroma. And of those three, each emphasizes a subtly different meaning. A scent is distinctive and seems to come alive in the nose. A fragrance can combine natural or artificial ingredients, but it is typically something created and added to a formula. Aromas are single-note. Thus, we catch the scent of a fragrance combining certain aromas. For a thing to be scented, fragranced, fragrant, or aromatic also connotes different ideas. I choose carefully.
The above is a symbolic list, not an exhaustive one. Time will tell if I add to it as I go or leave it as a sketch. But having a linkable online version of my reasoning seems like a reasonable addition to my writer’s toolkit for now.
The Perks
Yes, the samples, gift sets, and care packages from clients are amazing, but so is the knowledge I gain from doing the work.
Unsurprisingly, writing about beauty and health benefits produces beauty and health benefits of its own, as I get informed and inspired to take my self-care routine to new heights. I find the properties of plant extracts and other natural substances endlessly fascinating. The notion of synergistic action—that the right combination of ingredients outperforms the sum of its parts—is, for me, a highly exciting idea. I’m lucky to say, nearly a decade into this line of work, that my life is richer for the education I’ve been getting.
Another kind of pleasure comes with seeing my writing go live—on product packages, in posters and brochures, and on the web. Typeset by skilled graphic designers, flanked by great illustrations, and emblazoned on quality bottles and jars, my work in this beauty-conscious niche is an especially flattering mirror for my strategic writing. And that seems like the perfect place to end this very long post—and to thank my clients for their trust, openness, professionalism, and generosity.
