The pattern is always the same.
A company with a working content engine in English decides to go international. Blog posts rank. Email sequences convert. Landing pages bring in demos. Then someone on the leadership team says, “Let’s do this in German.”
The first instinct is to keep it cheap and close. Someone on the marketing team speaks German, so they handle the landing pages. A sales rep in Madrid takes care of the Spanish emails. It works for a while. Then it doesn’t.
After 10 years of working with companies at every stage of this progression, I can tell you that the path is predictable. Internal employees first. Freelancers, when that breaks. AI, when the budget conversation happens. Each stage solves the previous problem and creates a new one.
This post maps that path. Not the ideal version. The real one.
The In-House Translation Trap
Using people already on payroll to handle translations makes complete sense on paper. They know the product. They know the brand. They speak the language. Why pay an outside vendor?
It fails in practice for reasons that have nothing to do with language ability.
The biggest issue is verification. There’s no way to check if the translation is correct unless you happen to have a second native speaker on the team. Marketing managers sign off on content they can’t read. And in the worst case, validation comes from bad user feedback. That’s already end of the road. For every one message about a bad translation, ten people left without saying anything.
Then there’s the delivery problem. The person doing translations is juggling it alongside their actual job. Research on illegitimate tasks — work assigned outside someone’s core role — links this directly to burnout and reduced performance. Internal teams have deadlines for releases. They need translations ready. The translations aren’t ready. This creates friction between departments, and you can’t demand output from someone who’s doing this as a side task with no formal accountability.
The people doing the work are also usually wrong for the work. Marketing managers or in-country sales teams get assigned translation because they speak the language. But knowing a language and being able to write marketing copy in that language are two different things. Your sales team in Madrid translates what they need to land the client. Emails, case studies, product proof. That creates fragmentation. Now you have marketing content produced by people optimizing for their sales pipeline, not your brand.
And because everyone treats translation as a side job, something to get off the desk, nobody builds language assets. No glossary. No style guide in the target language. No translation memory. Every translation starts from scratch. Nobody is getting paid for asset maintenance and nobody is investing in it.
Alex Corkhill, Head of Content at Spinwise, described this pattern from a previous company. Internal native speakers adding flag emojis in Slack to confirm translations were done. 300 000 strings across 40+ languages. It’s a common starting point. Not a failure. Just a stage that every fast-growing international company passes through before realizing it doesn’t scale.
For every one user who messages you about a bad translation, ten left without saying anything. That's the math. And it's invisible unless you're looking for it. Your worst-case quality check is a complaint from a customer who already lost trust.
The Freelancer Band-Aid
Once the in-house model breaks, the natural next step is freelancers. Actual linguists. People who do this for a living. This solves the quality problem but creates a management problem.
I want to be fair here because the freelancer approach has real merit at a certain scale.
Having translators directly accessible to your marketing team is genuinely useful. Shorter feedback loops. Faster turnaround on small tasks. If you need one or two freelancers per language and you’re comfortable managing them, this can work well. The direct communication is where the value lives.
The problem starts when you need to scale.
A freelancer acts as an individual. They ask their own questions. They have their own schedule. They’re busy at times. If your campaign needs to launch on Friday and your German freelancer is unavailable, there’s no backup plan. No one else knows your product terminology. No one else has the context from last month’s project. And when the main freelancer is unavailable and the backup steps in, all that undocumented knowledge walks out the door. It’s a well-documented pattern in freelancer-dependent work — the scaling wall hits when institutional knowledge lives in one person’s head.
Terminology inconsistency between different freelancers isn’t the core problem, despite what most people assume. Good freelancers manage that themselves. They maintain a shared Google sheet or something basic. The real issue is that nobody’s getting paid for the extra work of maintaining language assets. So nobody invests in it. The glossary stays informal. The style guide doesn’t exist. And when the main freelancer is unavailable and the backup steps in, all that undocumented knowledge walks out the door.
At Bolt, this path eventually led to four separate agencies each handling different content types. That’s the logical endpoint. You add layers to solve the previous layer’s problem. Flag emojis in Slack was how they began. Fragmented agency ownership was where they ended up.
If you’re not ready to open your own little translation agency in-house, the freelancer model becomes unmanageable past a certain point. And most companies aren’t ready for that. They shouldn’t have to be.
AI as the Answer (Until It Isn’t)
This is where the conversation gets interesting. AI translation is fast. It’s cheap. And for certain content types, it works. Help center articles. Product documentation. Internal communications. Content that needs to be clear and correct, not persuasive or emotionally resonant.
For multilingual marketing content, the story is different.
AI makes everything sound the same. Without advanced prompting and proper data feeding, the output is generic. If you’re running localized campaigns across five markets and every market sounds identical, you’ve defeated the purpose of localizing. You wanted to feel local. You ended up sounding like a template.
The deeper problem is what happens when content asks users to act. To click, to sign up, to spend money. When someone takes a decision based on content and the experience breaks at any point, that feels personal. People feel betrayed when they see lazy localization. It’s not a language complaint. It’s a sign you don’t respect the market enough to try properly.
I’m not saying AI has no role in multilingual content marketing. Tone of voice can be prompted. Terminology can be fed in. To some extent, AI-assisted marketing localization is viable and getting better. But the emotional associations that make marketing copy work, the cultural weight of a phrase, the rhythm that makes a headline stick in one language and fall flat in another, AI can’t freely generate that. It hasn’t lived the human life.
One of our clients runs monthly benchmarks across four major language models, using ten different types of marketing copy, graded by native-speaker content people on a 12-point quality scale. They’ve been doing this for six months. Quality is not improving exponentially. In some cases, scores are dropping. And it’s not just about output quality. A 2026 Harvard Business Review study found that employees using AI took on tasks beyond their expertise, produced lower quality work, and burned out faster than before. The assumption that AI will “get there eventually” is not supported by what they’re seeing in practice.
Marketing people understand this better than anyone. They work with copy in the source language every day. They know that campaigns and content need to create a response, a reaction, an emotion. And they know from experience that AI is not the way to get there. Not yet. Maybe not ever for the content that matters most.
Lazy localization is not a language problem. It's a trust problem. When your content asks someone to spend money and the experience breaks, that feels personal. It tells your market you didn't respect them enough to try properly.
What All Three Get Wrong About Multilingual Content Marketing
The connecting thread across in-house employees, freelancers, and AI isn’t that they’re bad solutions. Each one works up to a point and for certain content types. The problem is that all three treat multilingual content marketing as a task to complete rather than a function to build.
Content gets created in English. Someone remembers it needs translating. It gets done under time pressure. Nobody checks if it actually works in context. Rinse, repeat. The translation is always the last step, tacked onto a workflow that was designed for one language.
And there’s a trust signal in all of this that most companies miss. Investing in quality localization tells your market you’re serious about being there. Cutting corners tells them you’re testing the waters with one foot out the door. Customers understand that a company willing to invest in human translation is a more reliable player. It lends a stamp of credibility.
For every person who complains about a bad translation, ten just left without saying anything. That’s the math. And it’s invisible unless you’re looking for it.
The measurement reality makes this harder. Localization is not a straight discipline. You can’t purely attribute revenue to it the way you can with a paid campaign. But you can see the signals. Support tickets in that language drop. Time on site increases. Conversion rates in localized markets trend upward. And when the data exists, it’s hard to argue with. The closer the content is to a buying decision, the more localization moves the numbers.
It’s a mixed growth driver, not a line item with a clean ROI number. But the companies that treat it as an afterthought are the ones whose international expansion stalls.
What a Working Multilingual Content Setup Looks Like
After in-house, freelancers, and AI, the companies that get multilingual content marketing right land on something more structured. Not more complex. More intentional.
A localization partner integrated into your communication tools. Not email threads with 48-hour response times. Daily communication on Slack or Teams. Tasks acknowledged and visible. When something needs to ship this week, both sides know about it.
Local glossaries built per market, per brand. Not a master glossary translated from English, but terminology that reflects what users in that market actually expect. Built iteratively as you enter each market and updated every time feedback comes in.
Tone of voice that’s allowed to adapt. Not a rigid brand guide forced into every language. A framework that preserves the company’s identity while letting the expression shift for local audiences. More on this below.
A content localization workflow where localization isn’t the last step. When the English version is ready, the localization brief is already in the pipeline. Not two weeks later when someone remembers.
And quality validation built in. Either through industry experts who audit translations or through structured feedback loops where in-country teams flag issues that get fed back into glossaries and improve the next round.
This isn’t a pitch. Take this list to any localization partner. Here’s what to ask before you sign. If the setup doesn’t look like this, something is missing.
Letting Your Brand Voice Breathe in Another Language
The most common ask on first calls about multilingual content marketing is “can you preserve our brand voice?” The honest answer is more nuanced than “yes, we’ll keep it the same.”
Brand voice is an identity thing. But there needs to be space for it to breathe in other languages. It needs to bend and combine with the target market user experience.
A brand that’s casual and conversational in English might need to bend toward more directness in German B2B contexts, or more formality in Japanese. The personality stays. The expression adapts to what that market’s users expect.
Industry-specific terminology matters more than brand terminology here. If your product uses a certain term for a feature, but users in that market have been calling it something else for years, your brand guide loses to the user’s vocabulary. Getting this wrong creates confusion, mixed client expectations, and in some industries, legal problems. Here’s how to adapt your brand voice for new markets.
The real skill is transferring the identity of a company entering a new market and combining it with the familiarity of the local industry that users already know. That’s where the magic happens. Not in a perfectly translated brand guide. In a glossary built with market context that captures how your brand talks in that specific market.
Translated brand guidelines tell you how your English voice sounds in another language. Local glossaries tell you how your brand should sound to the people who actually live there.
Translated brand guidelines tell you how your English voice sounds in another language. Local glossaries tell you how your brand should sound to the people who actually live there.
Talk to Us About Your Multilingual Content
If you’re at any stage of this progression, whether you’re doing translations internally, managing freelancers, or trying to figure out what AI can and can’t handle, we’ve seen your situation before. We can tell you what’s working, what’s going to break, and what the path forward looks like.
No pitch deck. Just a conversation about your content, your markets, and what it takes to get this right.
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FAQ
Multilingual content marketing is creating and adapting marketing content across multiple languages so it performs in each target market. It goes beyond translation. Effective multilingual content adapts messaging, tone, and cultural context so a landing page, email sequence, or ad campaign drives results in German or Spanish the same way it does in English.
No. Start with content that directly touches revenue: landing pages, checkout flows, product pages, and transactional emails. Blog content and thought leadership can come later. The companies that try to translate everything at once either run out of budget or can’t maintain quality across markets.
AI works well for high-volume, consistent content like help center articles and documentation. For marketing content that needs to convert, persuade, or build trust, human involvement produces better results. Tone of voice can be prompted to a degree, but the emotional associations that make marketing copy work require cultural understanding that AI doesn’t generate on its own.
Costs depend on content type, language pair, and level of adaptation. Translated blog content and help center articles are priced per word. Transcreation of landing pages, ad copy, and email subject lines is priced by the hour because the content is rewritten, not translated. See our marketing localization pricing for specific rates.
Brand voice needs space to breathe in other languages. The goal isn’t to sound identical in every market. It’s to preserve the identity of your brand while adapting the expression to what local audiences expect. This means building local glossaries per market and allowing tone to shift based on cultural and industry norms.
This is the biggest concern we hear. Options include industry expert audits where someone in your target market reviews the output, structured feedback loops with in-country teams, and working with a localization partner with ISO certification and mandatory review processes. Trust builds over time through consistent quality and transparent communication.
