The Importance of a Translation Style Guide: Keeping Your Message on Point in a Globalised World
Keeping your brand image and messaging consistent when speaking to various audiences has always been challenging. When it comes to translating content into different languages, the task can seem Herculean; it’s not just different demographics you have to appeal to, but entirely different cultures. Every language has its own nuances, and your brand has to feel the same across each one you want to use.
This is where a translation style guide can prove a vital tool for you and your enterprise.
What is a translation style guide?
You’ve probably already heard of style guides in a more general sense. Magazines, academic publications, and media organisations all use them to keep their content consistent. You may even have style guides embedded within your business already for the same reason.
But what exactly is a translation style guide, and how is this different?
A translation style guide is a document that lays out how translators — or language service providers (LSPs) — should localise your content. It keeps translated content on-brand and consistent by detailing your rules for things like language, tone, specific word usage or format, and more.
Translation style guides also help translators navigate what can sometimes be linguistically tricky terminology, ensuring that company-specific phrasing, brand names, or vital messages are translated thoughtfully and accurately.
Why do you need a translation style guide?
With all manner of tasks, deadlines, and ‘must-haves’ vying for attention in a busy communications team, the development of a translation style guide may sometimes slip down your priorities list.
Nevertheless, investing a few hours in establishing a high-quality, focused guide for your translators is definitely worth it. It can help curb language missteps before they’ve even surfaced, ensure everyone is singing from the same hymn sheet, and save you time and money further down the line.
So, what exactly does a translation style guide do to keep your international material on-brand?
Preserves your brand across international markets
When transferring material into different languages, it’s easy for your unique brand or company voice to become diluted or distorted. The further you look to expand, the greater the risk of your original source material becoming warped.
A translation style guide can help guard against your founding vision becoming skewed or misconstrued when framed in different languages, ensuring that key phrases are translated with the correct connotations and implications in mind.
A good guide will also help keep your company’s tone consistent across a number of different markets, helping to preserve the sort of voice you want to speak to your customers in.
Ensures consistency in spelling and important terminology
If you’ve decided a certain term is vital to your original message, a translation style guide can help make sure it’s thoughtfully, consistently translated into each target language.
We all know that, when it comes to language, the devil is so often in the details. Grammar slips, misspellings, or inconsistent terminology can prove the bane of any team trying to make sure their brand looks good — whatever language that’s in.
Translation style guides can help translators keep important terminology spelt consistently across borders so that vital, company-specific terms aren’t mangled when transferred to a different region.
Keeps your content relevant for local audiences
Keeping your messaging consistent is one thing, but good localisation recognises that every target market is different.
A promotional piece that lands successfully on one side of the globe might prove confusing or irrelevant for folks in another hemisphere. Young professionals in Melbourne aren’t necessarily going to share the same frame of reference as business owners in Karachi.
By developing translation style guides with the help of local language and marketing experts, you can help ensure that your translators and writers are crafting content that speaks directly to the people you want to reach, wherever they might be.
Local nuances, cultural references, and country-specific phrasing are all things to consider if you don’t want your message to stay ‘trapped’ in its mother tongue.
Reduces time spent localising material for new audiences
A translation style guide can help prevent you from revisiting the same questions and reliving the same discussions over and over.
How should writers translate an important phrase or word when there are various possibilities to choose from? How are we going to replace a term that doesn’t have a literal equivalent outside of its source language? How conversational did we agree this tone was supposed to be? Can you spell that word out for me again?
Any issues that crop up more than once can be covered and resolved in your translation style guide, speeding up the localisation process and saving time and energy for getting your message out there.
Cuts down on the cost of your translations
Time is money! A good translation style guide is going to reduce time spent ironing out the same recurring issues across numerous projects, setting clear benchmarks for everyone to follow and boosting translation efficiency across the board.
The more projects that end up benefiting from your translation style guide, the more time, effort, and cost you’re going to save overall. Less time spent on translation projects means less money spent on translation projects. It’s that simple!
What does a good translation style guide contain?
A good translation style guide will have its foundations in your company’s own character and vision, but they work best when they’re developed specifically for each language you’re looking to translate into.
Each guide will also differ depending on the specific needs and services of your business. A software development company is likely to require a very different set of specialised vocabulary to a financial services firm.
But even with these variations in mind, most translation style guides worthy of the name are going to contain some of the same key features.
Information on your brand and voice
You’ll want to ensure that your translators, just like anyone else working to get your message out there, have a solid grounding in how you want to present yourself.
What sort of image are you looking to project to the world? What type of business do you want your customers to see, and how might this shift slightly depending on the region you appear in? Does your brand come with a certain attitude, personality, or style?
You can also include guidance on the tone of voice you want your translated material to adhere to. Are you creating informal, chatty content for an online marketing campaign? Are you developing technical training materials that require a more ‘office-appropriate’ register? How liberally do you want your translators to use regional slang, or how close do you want them to stick to the specific vocabulary used in the source material?
There are some languages — including French, Spanish, and Portuguese — where guidance around formal or informal modes of direct address may be needed. Should your writers use ‘tu’ or ‘vous’, ‘tú’ or ‘usted’, ‘tu’ or ‘você’? The more specific you can be when it comes to tone, the better.
Information on your target audience and customer base
You probably already have a pretty good idea of who your target customer is — your marketing team might even have whole reams of documentation devoted to the subject. Your translators are going to be able to do their job better if they also know the sort of audience you’re looking to gear content towards.
Information on your target audience is also likely to require specialised, local knowledge, not just marketing ideas from within your own team. Understanding local trends and tastes, as well as cultural and religious codes, can mean the difference between content that’s accessible, friendly, and relevant, and poorly researched material that misses the point, offending or confusing the target market.
A good translation style guide will be aware of its local audience, and will provide translators (who may not be part of that local audience) with information about who they are talking to and how they need to translate your message accordingly.
Helpful reference materials
There are few better ways to show translators what sort of work you’re looking for than by showing them good examples of previously localised material.
Do you already have marketing copy that has successfully made the leap into a specific country or region? Can you give examples of content from local competitors that, in some way, match the sort of messaging you’re hoping to put out yourself? Have you already launched promotional campaigns in other regions that appear to have hit the mark and brought in new customers?
Share what’s worked in the past — as well as examples of what you want your content to look like, in the languages you’re looking to communicate in. This will help translators better understand the tone, style, and direction they need to be aiming for.
Key terminology
Terminology really is the bedrock of any helpful translation style guide.
We’re of the opinion that a top-shelf guide will come with its own terminology glossary — a focused and constantly-updated list of vital terms, words, and phrases that relate to your business, along with guidance on how these should be translated for a target audience.
Company-specific terms
You might want some specific terms related to your company to remain untranslated, regardless of the language they appear in. These might include trademarked products, copyrighted material, or neologisms (new words or phrases) you invented to market a specific service or idea.
Depending on your company’s source language, you may have words that contain specialised characters that need preserving across borders, like the German umlaut or a Romanian circumflex.
On the other hand, you might operate using different brand names in different regions. Frito-Lay, the food conglomerate, are a famous example of this; depending on which country you eat their crisps in, you could find yourself munching on a pack of Walkers (UK), Lays (USA), Chipsy (Egypt), or Tapuchips (Israel).
If you have company-specific terms that need to be altered depending on your target market, a translation style guide is the place to ensure that these translations are done consistently and with proper attention to spelling.
Industry-specific terms
Each industry has its own specialised vocabulary, some of which you may need to clarify or think about carefully before it’s translated.
Homonyms — words that have the same spelling or pronunciation, but different meanings — can be particularly knotty for translators when used within industry-specific contexts.
Take the word ‘clip’, for example; your translators are going to want to treat that word differently depending on whether you’re a hairdresser or a film editor!
Although a skilled linguist will be able to navigate more common vocabulary traps, the more specialised your source material is, the more room there will be for misunderstandings and mistranslations. Try to work out which terms are likely to prove confusing ahead of time and provide clear guidance on how they should be dealt with.
Audience-specific terms
Your audience may also have their own vocab or terminology that won’t transfer well to new audiences, or that has no direct equivalent in the target language.
‘Ghosting’, ‘breadcrumbing’, ‘breezing’, and ‘benching’ are all terms that have recently cropped up in the fast-moving world of online dating. They’re good examples of how audiences can invent and drive new forms of industry-specific language, including terminology that seems to emerge and then disappear almost overnight. Young consumers are particularly adept at creating, adopting, and then abandoning phrases in the blink of an eye!
It’s important to keep up-to-speed with slang that’s relevant to your industry and the markets you’re translating content for. Try to ensure that, if your content is likely to require audience-specific terms, these terms will land properly with new markets. This means having consistent, thoughtful alternatives for newfangled words that have no clear equivalent in another language.
SEO keywords
This is an area that can often be overlooked when putting together a translation style guide, but savvy marketers will bear local SEO keywords in mind when they’re looking to translate material.
Are there specific words or terms that you want to be hitting in each local market? Remember, SEO keywords vary from place to place. What’s hot and trending in one country might not even scrape the search engine rankings in another.
Consider working closely with local SEO experts so that you can identify important phrases in each region you’re looking to communicate with, and try to ensure that these specific phrases are highlighted in your style guide for translators to aim for.
General terms
You’ll want to consider proper nouns (names of people, countries, famous landmarks) and how these are going to be translated if they’re likely to crop up regularly in your translated material.
Is it important for your messaging that ‘London’ appears as ‘London’, regardless of the audience? Alternatively, are you keen for your Finnish readers to have ‘Lontoo’ printed specifically for them?
First names may also be something you want to include guidance on, especially if they are interchangeable and used primarily for the sake of examples.
Pablo, Martina, and Francisco could work well as placeholders in an educational guide for Spanish readers, but will sound less familiar to an Indian audience. Potential customers in Mumbai may be more used to seeing Raj, Sunita, and Sunil appear in promotional material.
Keeping your translation style guide focused
Once you start thinking about the possible pitfalls that come with translation, it can feel like you’ve opened up something of a Pandora’s box. You might be tempted to guard against error by including anything and everything a translator may need to know, no matter how unlikely.
You’ll soon find that trying to squeeze everything in is neither possible nor helpful. The more focused and specific your translation style guide is, the more useful it will prove in helping your translation projects flow smoothly.
Ask yourself: what fundamental issues are likely to crop up when translating your company’s text into a new language?
Focus on terminology that is relevant and specific to your business, industry, and target audience; don’t try to cover every possible translation query that could ever rear its head. Remember, skilled translators will already have the experience and language proficiency to navigate around more common issues, and issues that crop up regularly can always be added to the guide over time.
Other examples of overstuffing your document could be providing unnecessary guidance on colour schemes, layout, or visuals. This is supposed to be a translation style guide, not a graphic design manual! Do your translators really need to know whether to use bullet points or dashes as list markers? Do they need to know if tables should come with or without external borders? Maybe you do have content creators that are translating and designing visuals simultaneously, but in most instances, you’ll have different folk for different tasks.
How to create a translation style guide
You now know how a translation style guide can aid your business, as well as what you need to include in one to keep it focused and helpful for translators. But how do you actually go about creating one of your own?
If this is your first time developing a translation style guide, the prospect of starting from scratch can be daunting. Fortunately, there are a number of things you can do to anchor the process, so you’re drawing on your best minds when getting the document up and running.
Use any existing style guides as starting points
There’s no point reinventing the wheel when it comes to creating your new translation style guide. You may already have plenty of solid guidance around keeping your brand on point, maintaining your company’s public image, and identifying your target audience, and this can all be condensed and repurposed for translation projects.
Survey any existing style guides or marketing strategies you’ve built for your business and find the parts that are going to be relevant for translators. Remember, translation style guides are all about promoting consistency; using established company resources as a foundation can help keep everyone reading off the same page, and save a lot of time and effort.
Think about your target languages
It can be tempting to try a ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach. Why not just create a single guide that can be used for all projects, across all markets?
Granted, there are going to be some shared elements across the various style guides you develop. But a truly useful translation style guide will be built with a specific target language in mind.
This is important for a number of reasons. First of all, specific languages come with their own specific translation hurdles. Translators working from English to Mandarin are going to encounter a whole different set of challenges to those working to produce Arabic copy.
What’s more, you’re going to want to include skilled linguists and local marketing experts in the development of your style guide; these are the professionals who understand the nuances, trends, and linguistic ‘dos and don’ts’ when it comes to speaking to your target audience in any given region.
Glossing over these important differences, or pretending that all languages function the same way, will leave you with a simplistic, impractical document, from which no targeted translation project can truly benefit.
Consult the people who matter
Translation projects often involve a whole spread of stakeholders, from content creators to end users. You’re going to want to look outside the confines of your in-house marketing and communications team when it comes to building your style guide.
Talk to people who are going to be responsible for creating and translating your content. Ask them what challenges they frequently encounter, especially ones that relate to interpreting certain concepts or phrases.
Bring in regional marketing experts who understand the consumer patterns, SEO trends, and frames of reference for each language you’re targeting. Talk to potential customers who you’re hoping to reach with your translated material, and maybe even have them give feedback on some trial content to see if this can unearth possible translation pitfalls.
Try to get a sense of what other companies are doing in the same market. What does their content look like? Are there elements you want to imitate, improve on, or avoid?
Keep your translation style guide updated
Any good translation style guide will be a constantly evolving entity, with new terminology and advice being added each time new issues or challenges arise.
International communication is a constantly shifting field. You may find there are sections of your guide that can be cut to make room for newer, more up-to-date guidance.
The best way to keep your translation style guide alive and healthy is to remain open to feedback from your creators, translators, and customers. Are the same questions from language service providers cropping up time after time? Are the same phrases proving difficult to translate into a particular language? If so, you probably need to add some fresh directives to your guide to help steer people through these issues.
Final thoughts
A good translation style guide will ensure your translators are all in sync, keeping your content on-brand across international borders whilst remaining sensitive and relevant to local audiences. If you’re looking to branch into new markets, or are trying to get your message out there in a language you’ve not used before, taking the time to develop a focused and company-specific guide could save you all manner of ‘translation frustration’ further down the line.
Why not bring on professional LSPs to help you develop a translation style guide that actually does what it needs to do? Few people are better qualified to help than those who have experience in using these style guides themselves.
At ZippyLingo, we have a wealth of industry knowledge and extensive, hands-on experience. We can help you produce a guide that’s focused on the customers and languages you’re looking to communicate with — one that will help keep your message consistent and your voice clear, whether it’s in Swahili or Swedish, Maori or Malay.
