
Global business
Translation management
A strong brand identity is a consistent one. Your messaging, visuals, and tone of voice should follow a unified standard across channels and touchpoints. However, when you expand into new markets, the need for localization arises—and translating content presents a unique challenge in ensuring consistency and accuracy.
To ensure that what makes your brand unique and memorable reaches new audiences in their native language—without its identity getting lost in translation—developing a translation style guide is essential. In this guide, we’ll discuss the need for a translation style guide and provide best practices for using one.
First, let’s go over the basics of using style guides, and the importance of having one in place. A style guide, in a general sense, is an overview of enforced standards for writing content. This could include things like tone of voice, sentence structure and syntax, spelling conventions, capitalization rules, abbreviations, and acronyms—all to create a consistent brand voice.
When you need to translate your content into other languages with the help of a CAT tool, maintaining this consistency is critical. That’s where a translation style guide comes into play: It serves as the rulebook for accurately translating your content for each language you’re targeting while preserving its original meaning and intent.
When done right, a translation style guide can help ensure that what makes your brand special shines through in all languages, cultures, and markets. That’s why it’s important to develop your translation style guides—one for each language you’ll be translating into—as early in the localization process as possible and share it with everyone working on your projects in a translation management system.
Translation style guides play an essential role in helping brands:
What to include in your translation style guide will depend on your specific needs and the type of content you’ll be translating. Generally, you want to examine everything from culture-specific phrases (idioms, slang) to how you handle numbers, dates, measurements, currency, and other technical terms.
Other key elements of a translation style guide include:
This section should provide information about the target market—key demographics, pain points, market obstacles, etc.—and the local culture, customs, and values. Try to include anything you have uncovered during the market research stage of your global expansion strategy. This will help translators understand the context of the content they’re working with.
For example, if you sell financial technology, this part of the style guide is where you’d include local competitor information, regulations, and the payment preferences of the target market.
This should include the brand’s mission, values, message hierarchy, and how your brand speaks to its audiences. Here, you would establish whether you want your tone to sound in terms of:
Formality conventions could vary from market to market. For example, if you’re translating from German into Argentine Spanish, all formal pronouns will likely need to be replaced with informal ones to avoid sounding stiff by local standards.
Guidelines on punctuation, capitalization—camel case vs sentence case in headings, for example—, sentence structure, and other grammatical conventions to ensure fluency and accuracy in the target language. For example, you may clarify that translators should use the active voice instead of the passive voice.
Guidelines on the use of gender-inclusive language would also fall here. Many languages have gendered nouns, verbs, and adjectives, so you may want to provide your translators with specific guidelines on how to handle gendered words in the target language.
In this section, you should clarify how you want your content to appear visually in the target language. This could include:
You may have brand elements—such as product names, slogans, taglines, etc.—that you want to keep in the original language so that they remain recognizable. A translation style guide should outline these exceptional cases.
Acronyms and abbreviations are often tricky across languages, so it’s vital to include guidance on what approach to follow.
For example, you may ask your translators that they spell out acronyms the first time they appear in the text and then follow them by their abbreviation in parentheses, or vice versa.
Sometimes, acronyms will need full localization, and you’ll need to warn translators about this it in your style guide. For example, in a text about British financial technology, translating an acronym like OBIE (Open Banking Implementation Entity) won’t make much sense in Spain. Your translators will need to replace the reference with Banco de España—the local regulatory body—, so BdE is a more appropriate equivalent acronym.
When it comes to creating the style guide itself, consider the following best practices:
Here are some tips for ensuring the successful adoption of your translation style guide:
A translation style guide isn’t just about getting the words right. It’s also about creating a consistent, recognizable experience in every language and culture you enter—one that resonates with your target audience and inspires them to become lifelong fans of your brand.
Follow the best practices outlined above to make sure you get the most out of your translation style guide. Doing so will help ensure that all translations will look and feel unified, professional, and culturally appropriate across all markets and touchpoints. You won’t regret it.
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Last updated on August 22, 2023.