Culturama

Say to a Swiss person “Three cantons and a pact!”, and they’ll probably reply: “The birth of the Swiss Confederation!” (and anyone who paid attention in history class will add “1 August 1291”). If you say: “Name an orphan raised in the mountains by her grandfather…,” they might start to think the standard of quizzes nowadays isn’t quite what it used to be. But if you ask how many Pope Leos have preceded the newly elected pontiff, that’s (a smidgen) more challenging. The interesting thing about these questions doesn’t lie so much in the answers but more in what they say about us – and about all the trillions of nuggets of information that we absorb from our first cry to our final breath and which make up our knowledge, our culture. While we share a common foundation of knowledge, we all build our own pillars upon it. At textocreativ, we draw upon and enrich this knowledge every day.

Culture is cultivated

Culture is developed through books, museum visits, the media, cinema, school and the opera, but also through travel, family, traditions, exhibitions, encounters and, above all, knowledge passed down from one generation to the next. Even if words do not suffice to define it – there are as many different cultures as there are human beings – like wine it improves over time and even has its own industry. Promoted under federal law since 2009, access to culture has been largely democratised over the decades, leading to stronger demand for translation and editorial services in this field. Our contribution to this sector, which is in continual upheaval in Switzerland, is the translation of websites, media information, flyers, programmes, guides, posters, newsletters and funding applications from cultural projects. Our portfolio includes clients as varied as the Migros Cultural Percentage, the Cantonal Museums of Valais, Culture Valais, the Fondation du Septembre Musical Montreux-Vevey and my-expo, to name but a few. We place great value – perhaps more than elsewhere in the industry – on producing the perfect editorial style for the target audience, which obviously varies depending on whether it’s a webzine on rock festivals, a tourist guide for the wider public or a booklet to help children grasp culture.

Our strong local presence in both the French and German-speaking parts of Switzerland means we can provide our clients with a quality that has become rare in our profession: the creation of authentic texts not just linguistically, but from a cultural perspective too: cultural references, touchstones and markers vary depending on the audience just as their usage does. French prefers the more formal “vous” to the familiarity of the German “du” (the big exception being social media), while the term “Romandie” is much more widely used in German-speaking Switzerland than the French-speaking part.

We pick up culture from everywhere

Whether general or specialist, culinary, artistic, sports-related, pop, literary, scientific, woke, corporate or mass – culture is all of these influences which make us what we are. And to add to yours (if that’s even necessary), habemus the answer to the question above: thirteen Leos have preceded the current Pope Leo XIV. Far be it from us to spread our culture like jam, but if we can bring a touch of sweetness to this brutal world, then why not share it!