Marketing translation works like a bridge between cultures.
A sturdy bridge can carry your ideas and messages safely across. But a shaky one built on weak foundations? It can damage your brand and break your bond with buyers.
What is translation in the context of marketing? It goes beyond literal swaps. It delves much deeper to capture emotions, convey the right tone, and demonstrate cultural values.
When done well, it builds real connections.
When done poorly, it costs reputation and revenue.
We created this guide to help you ace marketing translation projects. We’ll discuss what it takes to connect with your audience across markets. You’ll also find real-world examples of successful and failed translated campaigns.
Marketing translation is the strategic effort of translating a company’s marketing assets from one language to another in a way that retains the intent and impact of the original content. Unlike word-for-word translation, this process focuses on adapting the content in a way that it has the same appeal for a new audience.
Marketing translation involves a range of assets, such as website copy, taglines, product descriptions, social media posts, emails, and more.
If you want your brand to feel right at home in every market, follow these best practices for marketing translation.
A content brief includes your campaign goals, target audience, messaging, and creative intent. It lays out everything a translator needs to understand this campaign’s essence before they start the heavy lifting of translation.
Without this essential context, even the most skilled translators might miss the mark. They won’t be able to capture the tone, infuse emotions, and recreate the appeal of your original campaign.
Here are a few must-have elements to add to your marketing translation content brief:
💡Dig deeper:
Reach a global audience and maximize your brand’s visibility by translating content in multiple languages.
We created this sample content brief to help you prepare one for your campaigns:
We’re launching a spring promotion for our casualwear collection. The campaign will run for 2 weeks and aims to drive sales of lightweight, eco-friendly items in our Spring 2025 collection. The main message is centered on fresh starts, comfort, and easy style.
The translated content will be used in:
Not every marketing campaign is built equal.
Some content needs to be translated, while other assets need to be localized or transcreated. Here are the three main approaches to explore for different types of marketing content:
The wrong method can flatten your message or make it feel out of place. So, let’s understand each approach in detail to help you pick the right method for content marketing translation.
Use translation when your campaign doesn’t rely on emotional or cultural nuance. Instead, you want to solely focus on delivering information accurately.
This approach works best for factual and instructional content like FAQs, technical manuals, product specifications, and more.
🧠 Did you know?
Translation is an umbrella term for many types of translation methods. You can use literal (word-for-word) translation or go for literary, technical, and legal translations. Learn more about the types of translations to choose the one best-suited for your requirements.
Localization is a good choice for adding some cultural appeal to your content. You want to adapt your campaigns with slight tweaks to resonate with the local audience.
Use this method for blog posts, email newsletters, landing pages, and similar assets.
A key difference between localization and translation is that the latter includes only text, while localization covers every content format, like audio, video, design, software, and more.
Transcreation recreates the entire campaign to replicate the impact of your original message. It infuses emotion and creativity in your target language to persuade the audience rather than simply convey information.
This approach is ideal for ad copy, taglines or slogans, video scripts, and other campaigns for social media.
The translators and reviewers you work with can make or break the quality of your translation for marketing.
You need people who:
Even perfect grammar can feel off if the message doesn’t align with local experiences, humor, or trends.
This is why native translation experts help your content feel written for, not just translated to, a market. Their cultural insight ensures your brand doesn't sound out of place.
Partner with local translators to shape your content before it’s finalized. Set up a feedback loop where reviewers can flag phrases that feel unnatural or out of sync with local norms and suggest better alternatives.
Tools like Lokalise simplify this collaboration process.
Instead of emailing files back and forth, your translators, reviewers, and marketing team can work together in one place. Automate handoffs at different stages, add translation memories, and manage your brand style guide to make your process seamless.
Marketing translation can get messy really quickly, especially if you’re targeting multiple languages.
You have to collaborate with multiple translators, reviewers, and publishers. Without a structured setup, translations get delayed, version control gets messy, and quality suffers.
That’s why you need a seamless workflow to keep everyone on the same page and reduce friction between different touchpoints.
Here’s how to create this system:
Keep all your source content in a single location. It’s best to format everything in a similar file type, like PDFs. This means everyone can easily access all the main documents in one place without the hassle of trying to find the files.
Plus, translators don’t have to waste time converting the documents into the right formats.
Use translation management systems (TMS)
A translation management system platform like Lokalise can bring all your workflows together and build a strong infrastructure for marketing translation.
You can manage every action in one place with automated workflows, from assigning tasks to tracking progress and beyond. Add your brand style guide, glossary, and other guidelines to make life easier for translators.
Another critical part of your workflow is clearly assigning responsibilities to each stakeholder — campaign strategist, brief creator, translator, reviewer, and approver.
Alongside establishing ownership, you should also simplify handoff between these stakeholders to prevent unnecessary delays or miscommunication.
Set up guidelines for version control to avoid wasting time and effort on duplicate content.
Using Lokalise as your TMS gives you a more seamless approach to version control. The tool creates new branches for all the versions currently in progress. Merge these versions with the final one when it’s ready and reviewed.
Your workflow shouldn’t end with publishing. Document feedback from users and use this input to improve your translation process. You can add more specific points to your guidelines and share these insights with everyone to enhance the quality of output moving forward.
🔖Further reading:
Translating marketing campaigns can seem daunting. But managing translation projects doesn’t have to be hard. Read our guide on translation project management to build your system.
Before going live, keep space for a thorough review and testing process to make sure your translated content makes sense for the local market.
You don’t want to roll out poorly translated campaigns that underperform — or, worse, damage your reputation and credibility. It’s best to invest some extra time in testing everything with a set of native speakers.
Run soft translation testing with a small sample audience instead of running full-fledged surveys. You can also conduct translation testing with internal staff early on to avoid last-minute changes.
Create clear parameters for reviewers to assess your content. Include criteria like flow, clarity, emotional appeal, cultural fit, and more.
💪 Review to perfection
Level up your translated campaigns with a strong review process. Build a well-thought-out translation review workflow and guidelines while giving your team the best tools to complete this task.
You might think marketing translation is a simple swap from one language to another. Run a piece of content through a translation tool and call it a day.
In reality, good marketing translation is a nuanced and multi-step process. Here’s why it’s tricky:
Underneath every language is a set of cultural values that dictate how people think. That’s why messaging that works in one culture might confuse or offend people in another culture.
So, marketing translation becomes challenging because it has to account for these values and cultural differences unique to each region.
Marketing is about feelings, not just facts.
You can’t rely on literal translations to evoke the same range of emotions among audiences speaking different languages. A fun and witty tagline in English can fall flat in Chinese.
Translators have to capture the correct emotional tone and adapt it in a way that hits home for a different audience.
Jokes rarely translate well. Puns, sarcasm, and wordplay often rely on specific language quirks or cultural knowledge.
To make humor accessible in another language, translators have to recreate the joke altogether instead of just translating the exact words.
Good marketing feels familiar because it touches upon the ideas and experiences of a local culture.
This is another area where translators have to truly dive into a region’s culture to adapt the messaging with the right references, idioms, and more. They have to convey the ideas in a way that strikes a chord with the local audience.
Wondering whether your translation efforts will even pay off? Or what happens if they miss the mark?
I collected these real-world examples to show you the impact of good and bad marketing translation.
Pip & Nut is a UK-based nut butter brand. While expanding into Europe, they translated the product packaging for new markets and switched up the copy based on different cultures.
For example, they changed playful English phrases like “Ridiculously Good” and “Spoon-straight-from-the-jar” into fairly straightforward versions for German buyers. Their emphasis was on quality, sourcing, and health benefits with clever wordplay.
Why it worked: Pip & Nut adapted its fun and witty tone to fit different markets based on buyer preferences and behaviors.
Notion, a productivity software, saw massive growth as a result of building a localized UI and marketing translations.
In Japan, Notion modified its tone of voice to spotlight the values of professionalism and politeness. The brand changes CTA buttons like “Get Started” to more formal equivalents.
Why it worked: Notion built a marketing translation and localization strategy to tune its product for the Japanese culture and work environment.
Veja is a sustainable sneaker brand from France. They expanded globally by embracing marketing translations for every market.
For example, their focus in Brazil was on local sourcing and community impact. In the US, they highlighted value propositions around ethical fashion and conscious consumerism. Across all markets, they adapted their positioning while sticking to the same core story.
Why it worked: Veja used local insights to recreate their positioning and appear more relatable to their audience.
Swedish appliance company Electrolux presents a classic case of translation gone wrong. In their ad for a vacuum cleaner, they ran the headline: “Nothing sucks like an Electrolux.”
The intent was to highlight the product’s powerful suction capability. However, the phrase has a negative double meaning for the American audience. As a result, it became confusing and humorous for the local buyers.
Why it failed: A direct translation didn’t account for slang (sucks) or connotations in the local language.
Ford, the automobile brand, ran a promotional campaign in Belgium with the tagline: “Every car has a high-quality body.”
When translated to Flemish, the slogan implied that every car has a high-quality corpse. The translation didn’t adapt correctly for the word “body” and became an unintentionally dark message.
Why it failed: Literal translations without checking cultural or contextual meanings can lead to bizarre results.
Marketing translation isn’t an overnight campaign. It takes thorough planning and practice to create an airtight system, find the right collaborators, and build your guidelines.
It’s best to start small, see how things flow, and refine your process before scaling it to a bigger level.
Whether you’re a lean team of two or growing to 20 members, a translation management system like Lokalise can make life easier. Collaborate with multiple stakeholders, store your translation memories, create automated workflows, and more.
Sign up for a free 14-day trial to see how Lokalise can help.
Author
Shreelekha has spent the last 7 years helping B2B brands tell their stories through product-led content. Her ability to perform deep, journalistic research and build engaging narratives around complex topics is one of her strongest suits.
Thanks to her collaboration with eCommerce-focused brands, she's written extensively about international growth and gained firsthand experience in localized marketing. As she researched markets across Europe, the Americas, and Asia, she developed an instinct for cultural nuances that shape how different audiences engage with content. This sparked a deeper curiosity about how people navigate the virtual world. Through her contributions to the Lokalise blog, she's pursuing this curiosity.
Shreelekha is also skilled at creating product-led content. Her work with brands like WordPress, Backlinko, Softr, and Riverside continues to hone her skills as a writer, researcher, and marketer.
A big football and F1 fan, Shreelekha is currently learning Spanish and Japanese to feel more connected to her favorite sports and athletes.
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