For a long time, people have misinterpreted brand messages with branding. While branding aims to impact perceptions about a brand that urges the audience to choose it over its competitors, a brand message catches the eye, penetrates the mind, and forms perceptions. Forming and promoting a brand message is one of the crucial phases of a branding strategy — it portrays your brand's overall image and story, encompassing everything your brand is known for: your vision, mission, and values.
Translating Your Brand Message: The Dos
Use Professional Translators
Content, in any form, has high visibility and impact on the audience. When content holds such significance, the best choice is to leave it in the hands of professionals. Amateur or machine-only translation of brand messages risks losing the nuance, tone, and emotional resonance that make your message powerful.
Talk Like a Local with Native Translators
Machine translation is useful when you need to translate something in literal terms. However, it does not always work when you need to maintain a specific tone or adapt the content while keeping cultural relevance in mind. Using translation services from professionals native to the market will help you translate your brand message without losing the actual meaning you want to convey. Native translation experts can also update you regarding the dynamics in the local market so that you can adapt your brand message accordingly.
Keep an Eye on the Visual Presentation
Presenting your brand message is one of the keys to successful market penetration. Therefore, it becomes crucial to consider your website's localization while translating your brand message. Apart from the text, ensure that you also take into account the font style, size, and color of your brand message. You might need to create different visualizations for different target languages in order to get the same result irrespective of the variety of audiences.
Consider Transcreation Over Translation
When your brand message is in the form of a slogan or a tagline, the effective approach is transcreating it rather than translating it. For this purpose, it is better to consult native translators who also deal in transcreation services. While transcreating your brand message, you need to generate an entirely new set of words or phrases that offers the same meaning in the target language and creates the same impact on the target audience as the original version does on your fellow speakers.
Always Remember Your Target Audience
This is the most important thing to keep in mind. Whether you want to translate your brand message or any other marketing campaign, make sure you always consider your target audience, their cultural differences, and their needs. Since the brand message highlights the story and values of your brand, you must translate it in a way that reflects your company's values and vision while keeping local market specifications and culture in mind.
Translating Your Brand Message: The Don'ts
Don't Go at It by Yourself
Even if you have an advanced translation management system, it would not be a good option to translate your brand message alone. You could be excellent at forming a business vision, but translating it using the right context, terminology, and tone for global markets is entirely different. Your brand image is the most crucial thing that makes people aware of you, and the right brand image is formed when the correct and insightful message is delivered to your target audience. Ruining things at this stage can harm your brand image in the long run.
Don't Rely Solely on Machine Translation
No matter how advanced machine translation tools have become, they are still machines. It is challenging for a machine to understand the idea, emotion, or vision behind a short brand message with multifold meanings. Such tools can only translate your brand message word by word, which could be problematic in translating the message into different languages — especially for slogans, taglines, and emotionally charged content.
Don't Forget to Proofread
Although you have hired professional translators, proofreading remains essential. Even the best translators can make mistakes, and a second pair of native-speaking eyes can catch errors that might otherwise slip through. For brand-critical content, always use a multi-stage review process that includes both linguistic and cultural review.
Don't Ignore Cultural Nuances
Cultural nuances are the subtle differences in meaning, tone, and context that vary from culture to culture. Ignoring these nuances can lead to brand messages that are confusing, offensive, or simply ineffective in your target market. Always work with translators who have deep cultural knowledge of your target market, not just linguistic expertise.
How Into23 Can Help
At Into23, we specialize in brand message translation and transcreation for global markets. Our team of native linguists and creative translators understands both the linguistic and cultural nuances needed to make your brand message resonate in every market. Whether you need straightforward translation or full transcreation, we have the expertise to protect and amplify your brand voice globally.
Continue reading in Part 2, where we explore real-world examples of brand message translation failures and what you can learn from them.