Marketing Translation: How Brands Connect Across Cultures

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.

Translation for marketing goes beyond literal swaps. It goes 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.

What is marketing translation?

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.

How to approach marketing translation like a pro

If you want your brand to feel right at home in every market, follow these best practices for marketing translation.

Start with a clear content brief

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:

Campaign overview
Target audience details
Creative concept or theme
Core messaging and tone of voice
Key phrases or taglines to preserve
Visual context or design references
Market-specific considerations or sensitivities

💡Dig deeper: Reach a global audience and maximize your brand’s visibility by translating content in multiple languages.

Check out this content brief sample

We created this sample content brief to help you prepare one for your campaigns:

Campaign overview

Source Language: English
Target Language: Spanish (Latin American)
Campaign Name: Spring Sale 2025 – Email + Social Promo
Date: May 2025

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:

Instagram and Facebook ads
Homepage banner headline + CTA
Email newsletter (customer segment: past buyers)

Target audience

Age: 25–40
Spanish-speaking customers across Latin America
Mostly women, fashion-forward, eco-conscious, mid-income

Tone and voice

Warm, upbeat, friendly
Slightly playful and confident
Use contractions and everyday vocabulary (e.g., “te encantará” instead of “le encantará”)

Key messages

Celebrate the season with soft, breathable fabrics
Limited-time offer: Up to 30% off select styles

Words or phrases to adapt or preserve

The phrase “limited-time” should create urgency, but not sound pushy
“Lightweight” refers to fabric feel, not weight — use a term that evokes comfort (not thinness)
Avoid literal translation of “fresh start” — find an emotional or seasonal phrase that feels natural in Spanish

Design + layout notes

Email headline of 50 characters max
Social ads have a character limit of 90 characters max
Feel free to propose CTA alternatives that sound better in Spanish

Choose the right translation approach

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:

Translation: Direct and literal
Localization: Light adaptation to suit local norms
Transcreation: Creative reworking to match emotional impact

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.

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

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.

Localization vs Translation content types

Transcreation

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.

Collaborate with native speakers

The translators and reviewers you work with can make or break the quality of your translation for marketing.

You need people who:

Speak your target language
Understand the culture and local context

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.

Build a translation-ready workflow

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:

Centralize your content

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 TMS 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.

Centralize content management for translation

Define roles and handoffs

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.

Create a smart version control

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.

Plan for feedback and review

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.

Review, test, and refine content

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 testing with a small sample audience instead of running full-fledged surveys. You can also test 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.

Why marketing translation is harder than it looks

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:

Culture shapes meaning

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.

Emotions don’t translate well

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.

Humor is personal and cultural

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.

Creating local relevance is difficult

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.

5 marketing translation examples: Hits and misses

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.

1. Pip & Nut

Hit/Miss: Hit
Target regions: Germany, Netherlands, and Ireland

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.

2. Notion

Hit/Miss: Hit
Target regions: Japan, Korea, and France

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.

3. Veja

Hit/Miss: Hit
Target regions: Brazil, the United States, and the United Kingdom

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.

4. Electrolux

Hit/Miss: Miss
Target regions: United States

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.

5. Ford

Hit/Miss: Miss
Target regions: Belgium

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.

Translate for success in every market

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.