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A lot goes into defining your company’s brand. There’s your logo, web site, marketing materials, social media accounts, press releases, and so on. But throughout all those different media, there’s one common thread — your company’s voice.

Chances are your company has a distinctive voice that conveys your unique persona and ties into your overall brand. So when you translate your company’s materials into another language, why wouldn’t you want to maintain that voice?

A translation style guide is a template for handling your content and maintaining your company’s voice in other languages. It can include things like grammar, style, syntax, punctuation, capitalization, measurement, and tone standards for translators to follow.

For example, does your company take a more formal approach when addressing customers, or is your persona more casual and fun? Is your target audience younger, older, male, female, or a mix of different groups? Is your audience highly educated or technologically skilled? A style guide ensures that the translator knows exactly how to communicate with the intended audience.

For an example of an extremely thorough style guide, you can look at the ones Microsoft has created here. Don’t worry: your company’s style guide doesn’t need to be anywhere near as long as theirs. Even a one- or two-page style guide can prove immensely valuable during the translation. But Microsoft’s guides can still offer useful suggestions for what you may want to include in your own style guide.

MAINTAINING BRAND STANDARDS WORLDWIDE

Style guides also help to standardize your translations. Just as multiple people at your company might be responsible for writing its materials, if you translate those materials as separate projects over time, chances are they won’t all be translated by the same translator. A style guide helps to ensure that multiple translations all read as if they were written by the same person.

Having an in-country or in-house reviewer look over a translation after it’s been completed can be another vital way to make sure a translation adheres to your company’s style, but that process typically results in increased turnaround times.

Defining your standards ahead of time via a style guide, especially when using it in conjunction with a glossary, can ensure that the translation reads just the way you want it to without having to go through needless revisions. (For instance, imagine how helpful it would be to know to use the formal usted form in Spanish before translation as opposed to going back and changing it throughout the translation after the fact.)

If your company doesn’t have a style guide yet, it may be worthwhile to create one. It can be as general (“Use formal, business-appropriate speech.”) or as in-depth (“Use only one space after a period.”) as you like. Either way, a translation style guide helps you to rest easy knowing that the corporate brand you’ve worked so hard to create is being carefully preserved in every language.