Things to prepare before creating your translation brief
When we work with translation clients, we don’t jump into translation brief creation work right away. Instead, we take the time to understand the client’s communication preferences since these will influence our translations.
We recommend you also do this for your brand by taking these steps:
Collate past writing samples
Gather samples of your brand’s existing written content to get reference points for your translated web content’s communication style.
For example, if the samples indicate that your brand engages users with informal language, your translated content might also need to give off a casual vibe.
What counts as writing samples?
Your website’s content definitely counts, of course. So do brochures, email newsletters and social media posts – anything customer-facing.
It’s also a major plus if your brand has documented how it should communicate with its audience. You can then rely on these guidelines instead of deducing your communication strategy from separate content pieces.
Then, with your communication reference points in hand, proceed with these next tasks:
Prepare a glossary
Prepare a glossary – a document that lists the terms, or words and phrases, your brand often uses, plus their translated equivalents.
For instance, your glossary can include:
Translations for relevant industry terms.
Your brand’s preferred translations for certain concepts.
Source terms that your team shouldn’t translate, like product names.
Translations to avoid (because they portray your brand negatively, for example).
Having a glossary helps you maintain consistent terminology throughout your translated web content. This is key for getting your points and messaging across.
To prepare a glossary, review your brand’s writing samples and identify terms your brand regularly uses in its communications. Add these terms to your glossary, and then decide on how to translate them (if at all).
If you work with a translation partner, they’ll help collect your preferred terminology for constructing the glossary. This collection work is a “very big milestone”, according to Susanna Eriksson, Senior Account Manager at TransPerfect.
“The brand might have language choices for some terms, and we want to establish this upfront,” she explains.
Susanna also provides this helpful tip:
Consider having your glossary distinguish between mandatory translations and optional ones the translator can use if the context fits. This way, you empower your translator to use the best translations for the situation.
Create a style guide
Create a style guide, which is a document that outlines your brand’s writing style – in other words, the way it presents information in words.
Referencing a style guide during the translation process helps maintain translation consistency across your web content. This is especially true if you’re translating many pages or if your content is on different website sections.
A comprehensive style guide will address matters like:
Tone of voice, which communicates your brand’s personality.
Your target audience and their traits so the translator can tailor translations to appeal to them.
Any website section-specific style instructions, like providing accurate technical explanations in blog articles and using more persuasive language in sales copy.
Writing conventions, which cover your preferred spelling, capitalisation and formatting. For instance, you might prefer to use British English spelling, present headings in title case and write dates in “DD MMM YYYY” format.
Currency conventions, including whether to display the currency code before or after the price.
If your brand has detailed communication documentation, try repurposing some of it into a style guide. Otherwise, review your brand’s writing samples to tease out its unique writing style. Then, compile your style guide from there.
Finally, don’t forget to prepare style guides for each language you’re translating your web content into!
Different languages may call for different writing and formatting requirements – or even completely different target audiences, for example. Whichever the case, cater for these considerations separately.
How to create a web content translation brief: general information to include
With the preparation work done, you’re ready to create your web content translation brief.
In this section, we’ll cover the essential information your brief should have, regardless of web content type.
And you don’t have to create your briefs from scratch: download our free web content translation brief templates instead. These templates contain our recommended information fields and are ready for immediate use.
Project name
Use a descriptive name that helps you identify the project your translation brief is for. An example project name could be “ABC Company ecommerce pages translation 2025”.
Person in charge
Provide the name and contact details of the person in charge of the translation project. This lets your team know who to direct questions to.
Project deadline
State the project’s deadline to set expectations for its completion date. This information also helps other teams coordinate initiatives, such as marketing the translated web content.
Project goals
Establish the target outcomes for translating the content. Common project goals include:
Source and target languages
The brief should specify your web content’s:
Target audience
Provide background on the people you want your translated web content to reach. With this information, the translator can better cater to your audience’s characteristics, preferences and pain points.
Tone of voice
As mentioned above, a brand’s tone of voice reflects its personality. If you’re identifying your brand’s tone of voice for the first time, look for:
Content on your website in the target tone of voice, so you can have your translated content match it.
Content on your website that’s not in the target tone of voice, so you know not to follow it.
Likewise, it might be helpful to identify brands whose tones of voice you want (or don’t want) to emulate.
Take the differences between the luxury brands Dior and Fendi’s tones of voice, for example. Both brands are TransPerfect clients, and they have different communication strategies despite being under the same holding company, LVMH.
“Dior has a rich and descriptive kind of style,” shares Meritxell. “Whereas Fendi has a very factual, straight-to-the-point communication strategy.”
“This was communicated to us by one of Fendi’s in-house copywriters very clearly. She said, ‘We don’t want to use Dior’s communication strategies, because we want to be different from it.’”
Preferred terminology
Ideally, you’ll have a glossary listing your preferred terminology in detail. But if you don’t, your brief should contain the preferred terminology for key terms. This includes terminology to avoid.
Location of content
State the parts of your website you’ll publish the translated content on – or even their specific locations on a webpage.
This information is important as it can affect the resources you use for the translation. Meritxell cites the example of investing in higher-quality translations if your content enjoys higher traffic or visibility.
The content’s location also indicates the available space for its translated counterpart. If you’re translating button text, for instance, ensure the translation doesn’t appear too long or short in the button’s container.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) considerations
Don’t overlook the translation of related web content metadata that can impact your search engine rankings.
This metadata includes:
Target keywords, which may need to be modified to fit the new audience’s search intent.
Meta titles and descriptions, which can drive clicks from the search results to your web content.
Creating translation briefs for particular web content types
Apart from the general information mentioned above, your web content translation brief should include certain other information if you’re translating blog articles, B2B service pages or product pages:
Blog articles
Describe your translated blog articles’ end goals in your brief to help your team produce translations that meet them. These goals typically differ from your project goals as the latter has a broader focus.
Let’s say the goal of your translated blog article is to educate the reader on your product’s value. If so, you need to ensure the translation communicates information on your product engagingly and persuasively.
This could then help achieve your project goal of improving awareness of your products in your new target market.
Your brief should also include notes on the relevance of the existing article’s material to the new target audience. If most of it is irrelevant, consider rewriting the new article’s content entirely (i.e. transcreation) instead of translating the existing information into a different language.
“A common challenge I’ve encountered is deciding how closely the translated web content should stick to the source material,” shares Marcus Riberg, Head of Content at Semantix.
“I think many webpages can benefit from a mix of translated and original content.”
B2B service pages
The translation brief for a B2B service page is similar to that for general web content. But its description of your target audience should be comprehensive if it isn’t already.
For example, apart from identifying your target audience’s industry and business size, drill down into its:
Why do this?
Because one-third of B2B customers prefer digital self-serve options for completing the sales process, as McKinsey’s 2024 B2B Pulse Survey shares.
To cater to this demographic, your translated B2B service pages need to communicate attractive value propositions and reduce sales objections the best they can.
“When working with translation clients, we ask about the target audience and the level of formality they expect from the content,” says Meritxell.
“These questions help us elaborate more on the personas of prospects visiting these B2B service pages.”
Product pages
With product pages containing many components, don’t overlook translating any of them.
So, your brief should identify all components that need translating, such as:
Long titles.
Short titles.
Long descriptions.
Short descriptions.
Features.
Benefits.
Where relevant, mention terminology, like the names of products and product lines, that should (or shouldn’t) be translated. If you have a full glossary for your translator to refer to, even better.
The product page translation brief should also provide information on layout restrictions the translator will need to work with. This could be as simple as saying “Long title cannot exceed 480px”.
You’ve created your translation brief. What’s next?
Once you’ve created your web content translation brief, hand it to your translators so they can start translating the content to meet your requirements.
Don’t have an in-house translation team? Consider engaging a trusted translation partner like Semantix.
We work with skilled translators to translate web content belonging to businesses in all industries. Our expertise in over 230 languages means no language pair is too challenging for us.
Our translators also use tools like GlobalLink Web to automatically detect and send new web content for translation. This speeds up the translation process and keeps costs down.
“An underrated success factor is finding translation experts to collaborate with in the long term,” shares Marcus.
“While we may tap into the same translation talent pool as our clients, we build relationships with our translators. Over time, we learn the information they need and can add it to our translation briefs before they ask for it – helping them do their best work for our clients.”
If you’ve already created translation briefs using our web content translation brief templates, our team can review and update them with any other necessary information before proceeding with translation work. We’re also happy to create briefs for you.
Schedule a no-obligations call to explore how we can assist with your web content translation project
