Translating Your Brand Is Not the Same as Speaking the Language

Every so often a client sends us a document and says something like, “can you just get this translated?” Just. As if translation is the easy bit, the admin task you bolt on at the end, the thing you hand to an intern or a free browser plug-in an hour before the deadline. We understand the instinct. We just think it’s wrong, and it’s wrong in a way that quietly costs brands real money.

Translation converts words. Localisation converts the experience. Those are not the same job, and treating them as the same job is how a perfectly grammatical sentence ends up saying nothing at all, or saying the wrong thing entirely, in front of the exact customer you were trying to win over.

The numbers you already half know

You’ve probably heard some version of this stat, because it gets quoted a lot and for good reason. About three in four consumers say they prefer to buy in their own language. Close to half won’t buy in a foreign language at all, no matter how good the deal is. That’s not a nice-to-have. That’s nearly half your possible audience deciding, before they’ve even weighed up the product, that this brand wasn’t built with them in mind.

Now put that next to the fact that South Africa has twelve official languages, and most brands still operate in one of them and simply turn the volume up. English copy, English tone, English idiom, translated word for word into Afrikaans or isiXhosa or Sesotho when someone remembers to do it at all, and called “localised” because the words on the page have technically changed. It hasn’t been localised. It has been converted, the way a recipe gets converted from cups to grams: technically accurate, and somehow still the wrong meal for the table you’re serving.

Correct and wrong at the same time

Here’s the trap with translation: it can be flawless and still fail. Take an English idiom like “it’s not rocket science.” Translate that literally into almost any other language and you get a sentence about rockets and science that means precisely nothing to the reader, because the idiom was never about rockets. It was about ease, about confidence, about a very specific English-language shrug. A translator working word by word will get you a grammatically perfect, culturally empty sentence. A localiser will throw the rocket out entirely and find the phrase your reader already uses to mean the same thing.

That’s the whole argument in one example. Grammar is not the same as meaning. You can be word-perfect and still land flat, or worse, land in a way that makes the brand sound like it’s reading off a script it doesn’t understand. And a customer who feels talked at rather than spoken to doesn’t stick around to work out which one it was.

Tone travels even less well than idiom. What counts as confident in English can read as arrogant in Afrikaans. What counts as warm and familiar in isiXhosa can read as oddly formal once it’s been flattened into English sentence structure with the nouns swapped out. Humour is the worst offender of all: a clever pun works exactly once, in exactly one language, and dies the second you try to carry it across.

Localisation is a brand decision, not a task

This is the bit worth sitting with. Localisation isn’t something you hand off after the creative work is done. It has to be part of the creative work, because tone of voice, idiom and cultural reference are brand decisions in every language, not just the first one you happened to write in. If you wouldn’t let a junior copywriter freelance your English tagline with no brief and no brand guidelines, don’t let a translation tool do it for the other eleven languages your customers actually speak.

Done properly, it starts with the same questions we’d ask in English. What does this brand sound like when it’s being funny? What does it sound like when it’s being serious? What lands as warm, and what lands as condescending? Those answers change per language, sometimes subtly, sometimes completely, and that’s exactly the kind of judgement call that belongs with people who think about brand and craft for a living, not with whatever algorithm is doing the swapping. It’s part of why our language services sit inside the same team that does the brand thinking, not off in a separate department that only sees the words after everyone else has finished.

A brand that speaks one language loudly is not reaching South Africa. It’s reaching the slice of South Africa that already speaks its language, and hoping the rest catch the general gist. Nearly half of them won’t bother trying.

If your brand is fluent in one language and merely translated in the other eleven, get in touch and let’s talk about actually being understood.