Cultural Adaptation

Cultural adaptation is the check that happens before something goes out, and the reason it exists is that most cultural failures are invisible from inside the organisation that produced them.

Not the language. The language usually passes. It's the stock photograph of a family that doesn't look like any family in the target community. The colour used for a health message that reads as mourning somewhere else. The gesture in an illustration. The assumption that the person making a household health decision is the person you addressed the letter to.

What we review

• Copy and messaging. Tone, register, directness, and whether the call to action assumes resources the audience has.
• Imagery and casting. Who appears, what they are doing, what that signals about who this service is for.
• Colour, symbol and iconography. Meanings that shift across cultures, and the ones that shift enough to matter.
• Layout and typography. Reading direction, script rendering, text expansion. Arabic and Thai break English-designed layouts in different ways.
• Structure and channel fit. Whether the format suits how this audience actually receives information, which is often not a PDF.

How the review works

Reviewers are native speakers from the specific communities in scope, not generalists working from a checklist of cultural norms. You get a written report per language group: what works, what carries risk, what has to change, and how to change it. Findings are graded, so a genuine risk is not buried alongside a stylistic preference.

Where a fix is straightforward we make it. Where it isn't, we say so plainly, because the honest answer is sometimes that this piece of content cannot be adapted for this audience and needs to be built for them instead. That's a transcreation job or a campaign job, not an adaptation one.

Where it belongs in a project

Before translation, ideally. Adapting the source once is cheaper than adapting eleven translations of it, and it prevents the pattern where a problem in the English original is faithfully reproduced in every language and then corrected eleven times.

For programs already in market, adaptation is the fastest way to lift performance without rebuilding. For anything new, pair it with multicultural research so the review is grounded in what the community actually said rather than what a reviewer expects them to say.