Communicate your brand voice in any language

Global companies typically invest significant time, energy, and money in crafting and defining their brand voice.

This creative process, which often involves external agencies, marketing managers, brand managers (both digital and traditional), sales managers, and senior management, can be long and contentious. Factors such as the brand’s target audience, the company’s core values, and the desired market image are all influenced by multiple stakeholders, each with strong and potentially conflicting opinions. After all, language itself is subjective.

Yet, after investing so much time and resources into the source language of your brand voice and terminology, content is often sent off for translation, often to translators with little brand experience.

Translators are usually professionally trained, but they are human after all. Therefore, they will interpret your message according to their own framework of understanding and translate it into their native language. The question is, how can you ensure that the translator can accurately understand your brand and maintain consistency during the translation process?

Based on our years of experience, here are some strategies to help you ensure brand consistency when localizing your content:

1. Decide what “language quality” means to you

Language is highly subjective. While accuracy and grammatical correctness of the translation are crucial, you also need to consider the style of the language and the voice of your brand. Putting ownership of the brand voice in the local language in the hands of native speakers you trust and involving them in the translation process ensures that the brand voice is faithfully conveyed.

2. Perform a language pre-screening

Work with your language service provider (LSP) to create a glossary of your brand’s defining “soft” terms; write brand guidelines that describe your brand’s ethos, tone, and other key elements; and develop a style guide that defines local grammatical conventions. Your LSP can then use these resources to conduct style tests with at least three different translation teams to help you select the translation team that best matches your brand’s voice.

3. Be patient and provide detailed feedback

Through high-quality reference material, translators can gradually understand your local brand voice. However, this process takes time (in fact, it can take months or even years) and continuous effort, as feedback must be detailed and frequent.

While the language pre-screening process may seem daunting, it is well worth your time and money. Think about how much effort you put into building your brand voice in the source language—the same care and meticulous work should be put into translating into other languages. By investing upfront, you will be able to reduce the risk of cultural or linguistic errors in markets with faster turnaround times, fewer review and editing steps, and a huge payoff.

This is your brand, make sure it is communicated successfully when entering new markets.

◀️：How to use website visitor data to choose your next target language

▶️：Arrow Translation: Frequently Asked Questions