We localize for operators running multiple brands across Scandinavian, Southern European, and Eastern European markets, German, Italian, Finnish, Norwegian, Danish, Bulgarian, Czech, among others. The brand personalities are just as varied as the languages.
Brand voice is what the operator controls. But conversion happens when that voice meets how a local market already thinks and talks about iGaming. Those two things are rarely the same. A Finnish player and a Spanish player don’t arrive at a casino with the same expectations, the same comfort with gambling language, or the same relationship with promotional copy. The regulatory environment differs by market too. What’s acceptable in one jurisdiction can get you fined in another. The brand guide doesn’t account for any of that. The localization work does, or it should.
- Why vocabulary lists aren't enough for iGaming localization
- Some things don't get translated. That needs to be managed.
- The English brand guide flags English risks. Not all markets share them.
- Formal or informal address is the iGaming question English brand guides skip
- What glossaries actually do in iGaming localization
- The brand guide is the starting point, not the answer
Why vocabulary lists aren’t enough for iGaming localization
Most brand guides for iGaming include a vocabulary section. Words to use, words to avoid. When you first read them, the rules seem clear enough.
The problem is they’re only clear once you understand the brand’s thematic logic. Without that context, the choices look arbitrary. Why is one word fine and a near-synonym completely off limits? Why does one brand ban a word that another brand uses freely?
The answers usually come down to the world the brand has built around itself. A brand built on sky sailing has a visual and narrative identity that’s very specific about what kind of vessel fits. Words that belong to sea-level sailing don’t fit. Words associated with leisure, not adventure, don’t fit. The line between approved and banned isn’t alphabetical but conceptual.
Translators who work from the word list alone will eventually make mistakes. Not because they’re careless, but because the brand guide gives them the rules without the reasoning. When a new type of content arrives that wasn’t anticipated in the original guide, they have to make a call. Without understanding the brand world, that call often goes wrong.
This is why we spend time at onboarding on more than just terminology. We build context. What story is this brand telling? Who is the player inside that story? What would feel out of place? The vocabulary list becomes much easier to apply correctly once those questions are answered.
It also explains why test translations matter so much in iGaming localization. Before we assign a team to a new brand, we run test translations across different content types. Not just to check accuracy. Any competent translator can be accurate. We do it to see whether the translator has absorbed the brand’s world. Whether their choices feel native to it.
When we run test translations for a new iGaming brand, we're not just checking accuracy. Any competent translator can be accurate. We're checking whether the translator's word choices feel like they belong to the brand's world — whether they've absorbed the logic behind the vocabulary, not just the vocabulary itself.
Some things don’t get translated. That needs to be managed.
Some iGaming brands keep certain elements in English across all markets. Loyalty program names. In-game currencies. Sometimes the brand’s own proprietary terms for features or experiences that exist only within their product.
The decision makes sense creatively. Translating a proprietary term risks losing the distinctiveness that makes it worth naming in the first place. If the loyalty currency has a name that carries specific meaning or personality in English, a direct translation often loses that.
But it creates a very specific iGaming localization challenge: you’re writing Norwegian copy, or Finnish, or Italian, and there’s an English word sitting in the middle of the sentence. It has to feel like a deliberate choice, not a mistake. Not something the translator forgot to handle.
Getting this right requires more than just noting “this term is not translated” in the glossary. It requires understanding how the term sits grammatically in each target language. Whether it takes an article. How it behaves in plural. Whether it needs any surrounding copy adjustments to make its presence feel natural rather than awkward.
In German, for example, a foreign proper noun sitting in the middle of a sentence still follows German grammatical logic in certain ways. Finnish has a completely different relationship with loanwords and foreign terms than Italian does. The brand guide says “don’t translate this.” It doesn’t say how to handle it across six different grammatical systems.
This is detail work. It rarely comes up in conversations about localization scope. It almost always comes up during the actual work.
The English brand guide flags English risks. Not all markets share them.
iGaming brand guides written for English-speaking markets are written with English-speaking cultural sensitivities in mind. When a brand’s thematic vocabulary includes language around delivery, speed, packages, being dropped something on your doorstep — that’s a playful, contemporary set of associations in British English.
In British English, there’s also a risk. Certain combinations of delivery-themed language can tip into associations you don’t want for a gambling brand. A good English copywriter knows where that line is.
But here’s the thing: that risk is market-specific. The cultural associations that make a particular phrase read wrong in British English don’t necessarily exist the same way in Finnish. Or Norwegian. Or Bulgarian. The connotation that makes a careful English copywriter pause doesn’t always translate.
We’ve seen iGaming marketing localization go wrong in two specific ways here.
The only answer is market knowledge. Translators who understand the local context well enough to assess a risk independently, not just follow rules from a brand guide written elsewhere. This is part of why specialized iGaming localization teams matter more than general translators with high accuracy rates. Accuracy isn’t what catches a culturally specific risk that the brand guide didn’t anticipate.
Formal or informal address is the iGaming question English brand guides skip
Finnish, German, Italian, Norwegian — each of these languages has a formal and informal register for addressing someone directly. The choice between them is one of the first localization decisions that has to be made for any new market.
Some iGaming clients have a clear preference. They want to feel accessible and casual across all markets, so informal address is right. Others are building a premium brand and want a more courteous, elevated register, so formal address fits better.
Many clients haven’t thought about it at all. The English brand guide doesn’t raise the question because English doesn’t have the same distinction. “You” is “you.”
When we onboard a new brand in a new market, this is usually one of the first conversations we have. What’s the intended relationship between this brand and the player? Should the copy feel like a friend talking, or a host welcoming a guest?
It sounds like a small decision. It isn’t. Once a register is established and copy is built around it, switching later means updating every piece of localized content. The registers in German or Italian aren’t interchangeable, swapping them out mid-relationship changes how the brand reads entirely.
Operators who approach localization as a translation task often miss this. They send source content, it gets translated, and at some point someone in the local market asks why the German copy feels oddly distant. Or oddly casual. And the answer is that nobody made the decision deliberately.
What glossaries actually do in iGaming localization
A glossary is often described as a list of approved terms. That’s true, but it understates what a well-built glossary actually does for an iGaming localization program.
For brands operating across multiple languages and multiple content types like UI copy, promotions, email campaigns, error messages, help centre content, a glossary carries the brand’s thematic logic into the file. It tells the translator which version of a concept is right for this brand, not just which word is approved. It stores decisions that would otherwise require onboarding each translator from scratch on every new project. This matters especially for responsible gambling content, where the Malta Gaming Authority requires that player protection messaging be clear and intelligible in every language — not just compliant.
This matters more in iGaming than in most other categories because the vocabulary is so specific to each brand’s world. A translator who worked on one campaign six months ago and returns for a new one shouldn’t have to re-read the full brand guide to remember what type of language is in bounds. That information should live in the glossary.
Building a glossary at the start of an engagement takes time. Maintaining it as the brand evolves takes attention. But for operators running multiple brands across many markets, a well-maintained glossary is what makes iGaming marketing localization consistent at scale. Without it, quality depends entirely on memory, on whether the same translator is available, on whether they remember the decisions made last quarter.
Memory is not a system. A glossary is.
These terminology challenges multiply in sportsbook content, where promotional mechanics vocabulary and sport-specific language add layers that casino content doesn’t have. More on that in sportsbook localization.
The brand guide is the starting point, not the answer
iGaming marketing localization is where brand voice, cultural register, and market-specific knowledge all have to exist at the same time, in every piece of copy.
The brand guide tells you what the brand sounds like in English. It doesn’t tell you how that travels into a different grammatical system, a different cultural relationship with gambling, a different set of local sensitivities that the English team never encountered.
That gap is where the localization team lives. Making calls the brand guide didn’t anticipate. Flagging risks the English copy didn’t know to worry about. Building the institutional knowledge in glossaries, style guides, and specialized teams. That lets a brand sound like itself in markets it was never designed for.
That’s not a translation job. It’s a localization job. And in iGaming, the difference shows up in every market you enter.
The Brief Is Where It Starts
If you’re running iGaming brands across European markets, you already know the brand guide exists. What’s harder to know is whether your localization setup is actually using it well, or just translating around it.
We work with operators on the full picture: building specialized teams per brand, running test translations before committing, setting up glossaries that carry thematic logic not just terminology, and making the register and cultural calls that the English source never raised. If any part of that sounds like a gap in what you currently have, it’s worth a conversation.
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FAQ
Translation converts the words. Localization converts the meaning. For iGaming, that distinction matters more than in most industries. A translated casino promotion might be grammatically correct in Finnish and still feel completely off — wrong register, wrong cultural tone, wrong relationship with how Finnish players think about gambling. Localization accounts for all of that. It’s the difference between copy that’s accurate and copy that actually works in market.
Brand guides are written for English-speaking teams working in English markets. They tell your team what the brand sounds like. What they don’t cover is how that voice travels into a different grammatical system, a different cultural relationship with gambling, or a market where the approved vocabulary list doesn’t map cleanly onto the target language. Translators who only have the brand guide eventually hit a situation the guide didn’t anticipate. Without context behind the rules, the calls they make are guesses.
We ask the client before anything is written. It’s one of the first conversations we have when onboarding a new market, because it shapes every piece of copy that follows. Some operators want informal across the board — accessible, friendly, feels like a peer. Others are building premium brands where a more courteous register fits better. The answer usually comes from understanding the brand’s positioning and the target market’s norms. German and Italian markets tend to require more deliberate thinking here than Norwegian or Finnish, where informal address is effectively the default.
They stay in English, but staying in English isn’t the same as doing nothing. A proprietary term sitting in the middle of a Norwegian or Italian sentence needs to feel deliberate. That means understanding how it behaves grammatically in each target language — whether it takes an article, how it pluralises, whether surrounding copy needs to shift to accommodate it. We document all of this in the glossary so it’s handled consistently across every piece of content, not decided fresh each time.
We build it during onboarding, working from the brand guide and any existing content. The initial version covers approved and avoided terminology, brand-specific terms, register decisions, and the thematic logic behind vocabulary choices — not just the choices themselves. For a single brand, a working glossary takes two to three weeks to build properly. It grows from there as new content types come in and new decisions get made. The time investment pays back quickly on any multi-language, multi-brand program where consistency across markets is non-negotiable.
Yes, and this is one of the things operators don’t always anticipate. Two brands from the same operator can have completely different English dialects, different thematic worlds, different banned vocabulary, and different tonal registers. A translator who does excellent work for one brand can be the wrong fit for another — not because of quality, but because the brand worlds are genuinely different and require different sensibilities. We build separate teams per brand and run separate test translations before assigning anyone to production work.
