Your brand guidelines tell everyone who touches your brand how it should look, sound, and feel. But when your brand enters a new market, the person reading those guidelines is a translator or copywriter who needs answers the English document doesn’t give them.
This post is about brand localization. Or brand localisation, if you’re British. It covers the gap between having brand guidelines and having guidelines that actually help a localization team. The 70/30 split between clients who want tight control and those who say “the English is just a starting point.” And how to build trust with the people carrying your voice into languages you can’t verify yourself.
Your Brand Guidelines Are Not Localization Guidelines
Clients coming from marketing departments are serious about their brand guidelines. It’s their central document. Issued to anyone who does work for the brand in the original language. It’s the rosetta stone for the digital presence.
And the rosetta stone works. In English.
Marq’s State of Brand Consistency research found that 85% of organisations have brand guidelines, but only 30% enforce them consistently. These guidelines cover voice and tone. Visual identity. Do’s and don’ts. Approved messaging. The kind of language to use and the kind to avoid. A good set of brand guidelines gives any English-speaking designer or copywriter enough to represent the brand correctly.
But here’s what brand guidelines don’t cover. Which formality level to use in German. Whether “you” should be du or Sie, tu or vous. Which idioms carry the right connotation in Finnish. What cultural references to skip in Japan. Whether the brand’s casual tone reads as friendly or disrespectful in a market where business communication is more formal.
Those are localization decisions. And most brand guidelines don’t make them.
Some clients include localization-specific sections in their guidelines. We work with an iGaming operator that built a localization page right into their tone of voice document. It covered British English conventions, date formats, emoji usage considerations across cultures, and a clear list of what gets localized and what stays in English. That’s rare. And it’s the gold standard for brand localization.
Most clients hand over guidelines that assume English. The gap between “we have brand guidelines” and “we have guidelines that help a translator do their job” is where most brand localization goes sideways.
The 70/30 Split Nobody Talks About
Before any translation starts, there’s a conversation about creative freedom. It’s one of the most important conversations in brand localization and almost nobody writes about it.
About 70% of our clients want the localized content to closely follow the English source. Same structure. Same messaging. Adapted for the language but not rewritten. The source text is the blueprint and the translated version should stay close to it.
About 30% say something different. They tell us the English is just a starting point. They want the localized version to feel like it was written for that market. Same goals, same brand identity, but the expression can be completely different.
This split doesn’t follow industry lines the way you’d expect. You might think SaaS brands want tight control and creative agencies want freedom. That’s not what we see. We worked with a SaaS company that gave us complete creative freedom for their converting content. Landing pages, ad copy, email sequences. They wanted it to sound native in each market, not translated from English.
It comes down to how the marketing team perceives new markets. Teams that see international expansion as a strategic priority tend to give more creative freedom because they understand that what converts in English won’t automatically convert in German or Japanese. Teams that treat localization as an operational task tend to want tight control because the source text is what was approved internally.
Neither approach is wrong. The mistake is not having the conversation before you start.
Most clients also shift over time. The first project is always the most reviewed. By the fifth project, trust is built and the process moves faster. The 70/30 split isn’t permanent. It’s where people start.
How Brand Localization Works Day to Day
Brand localization is not a one-time project. It’s an ongoing collaboration that builds over months and years. The companies that get the best results don’t try to create a perfect localized brand guide before any work starts. They build it gradually, from real decisions made during real projects.
Here’s what that looks like in practice.
We start with terminology lists. These define what gets localized and what stays in English. The brand name? Almost always English. Product feature names? Depends on the market and the product. Industry jargon? Depends on whether the local market uses the English term or has its own. These lists grow with every project.
Brand names and taglines come up early in this process. When a brand name is built on English wordplay, the localization team needs to flag it before anything else gets translated. We worked with a Nordic transport company whose name was built around the concept of “flow.” They’d even created verb forms of the brand name for their marketing. Elegant in English. Then they looked at the Swedish market.
Taglines need a similar early conversation. The options are to translate directly, to transcreate (adapt the concept for the market), or to keep the English version. Revenue content like product pages and CTAs should always be localized. Brand-level taglines need more careful handling because they carry identity weight. The right answer depends on the market and the brand’s goals, and it’s a conversation between the brand team and the localization partner, not a decision made by either side alone.
Then there are QA sessions with the translation teams. Not formal audits. Working sessions where translators can ask questions and get answers quickly. We keep live shared documents so responses don’t get stuck in email threads. When a translator in Helsinki needs to know whether “checkout flow” should stay in English or be translated to Finnish, the answer should come in hours, not days.
We don’t translate the tone of voice document itself. Instead, we supplement it as we go. After one project, we have a few localization notes. After five projects, we have a rich reference built from actual decisions. After a year, the localized brand reference is more useful than anything we could have written upfront. Because it was built from real questions, not hypothetical ones.
Trying to create a complete localized style guide before any translation work starts is like writing a user manual for a product nobody has used yet. You don’t know what decisions need to be made until you’re making them.
One thing I see misunderstood from the outside. Marketing directors don’t approve individual translations. They know better than that. Marketing directors handle brand localization on a strategic level. Is the style guide ready? Is the tone of voice verified for the new market? Are the budgets right for the quarter?
Marketing managers handle execution. They create the documents, check deliverables for consistency across brands, and work closely with the localization team to keep everything aligned. The day-to-day relationship between a marketing manager and the localization partner is where brand localization actually happens.
Trust Is the Quiet Part of Brand Localization
Edelman’s 2025 Trust Barometer found that trust in domestic brands outpaces foreign brands by an average of 15 points globally. Every client asks the same question eventually. “How do I know my brand sounds right in Japanese if I don’t speak Japanese?”
The honest answer: you don’t verify the translation. You verify the process. And then you build trust with the team doing the work.
Early in a cooperation, we provide maximum transparency. Back-translations. That’s an English version of the translated content so the client can read what was actually said and compare it against the source. We add extensive commentary explaining why specific choices were made. And we often provide more than one version of key content so the client can see the options and weigh in.
This is about nailing the brand’s preferences down early. Once both sides understand each other, the overhead drops. The localization team knows the brand well enough to make confident decisions. The client trusts those decisions because they’ve seen the reasoning behind them for months.
This is emotional as much as practical. Handing over your brand voice to people you can’t directly verify is uncomfortable. It should be. Your brand voice is how your customers experience you. The job of a localization partner is to make that discomfort go away. Not with promises. With consistent, transparent work that proves itself over time.
Brand Localization for iGaming Is a Different Game
iGaming operators don’t have one brand. They have a portfolio. One brand might be minimal and no-nonsense. Another might be vibrant and high-energy. A third might lean into adventure or futurism. Each one targets a different player profile with a different tone, different vocabulary, and different emotional hooks.
Brand localization for iGaming means keeping all of those voices separate and distinct in every language. A translator working on the minimal brand needs to write differently than the translator working on the high-energy brand. Even if both projects land on the same desk.
Market entry adds another layer. Regulatory bodies like the MGA in Malta, the UKGC in the UK, and the Curacao Gaming Authority control which markets an operator can enter through licensing. Once licensed, everything the player touches needs to be localized. UI copy, promotional emails, bonus terms, responsible gambling messaging, customer support. The player shouldn’t feel like they’re using a translated product. They should feel like the product was built for them.
iGaming used to compete on flashy visuals and big bonus numbers. That’s changed. Content quality is now a real differentiator. When competitors rely on poorly localized, generic copy, the brands that invest in native-feeling content win on engagement, conversion, and player retention. NIQ’s 2026 Consumer Outlook reports that 95% of consumers now say trust is critical when choosing a brand.
That’s exactly the gap one of our clients, Spinwise, identified across European iGaming markets. Competitors were using generic content that failed to connect with local audiences. By investing in proper brand localization for their marketing materials, email campaigns, and affiliate content, they increased conversions and opened new markets successfully. Their affiliates consistently report higher engagement because the content sounds natural and trustworthy to local players.
When your competitor’s promotional email reads like it was translated by a machine, and yours reads like it was written by someone who plays at that casino, the difference shows up in the numbers.
Let’s Talk About Your Brand in New Markets
If you’re working through brand localization for the first time, or if you’ve been doing it and something feels off, we’ve probably seen your situation before. We can tell you where the gaps are in your guidelines, how much creative freedom makes sense for your markets, and what the process looks like from week one.
No pitch deck. Just a conversation about your brand, your markets, and what it takes to get this right.
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FAQ
Brand localization is the process of adapting your brand’s voice, messaging, and identity to feel natural in a new market. It goes beyond translating words. Effective brand localization adapts tone, cultural references, and emotional associations so your brand connects with local audiences the same way it does in your home market.
Translation converts text from one language to another. Brand localization adapts the full brand experience. This includes decisions about which elements stay in English, which get transcreated (adapted creatively for the target market), and which get fully localized. Translation is one tool within brand localization. Not the whole process.
Start with terminology lists that define what stays in English and what gets localized. Run QA sessions with your localization team. Build localized brand references gradually through real project work rather than trying to create a complete guide upfront. Close collaboration between your marketing managers and your localization partner is what makes brand consistency work across markets.
Beyond the standard voice and tone guidance, include formality level per market, words and phrases to avoid in specific languages, terminology that must stay in English, cultural references that don’t translate, and examples of good and bad localized content. The best brand guidelines have a dedicated localization section that grows over time as you enter new markets.
Costs depend on what you’re localizing, how many languages, and the level of adaptation needed. Translated marketing content is priced per word. Transcreation of taglines and campaign copy is priced by the hour because it’s creative work, not just translation. Brand localization that includes terminology development and ongoing QA is often handled through retainer arrangements. Our marketing localization page has detailed pricing for each service type.
