Mirela
It’s a real problem when your translators, editors, reviewers, and product teams all interpret the brand a little differently. Luckily, there’s a thing called a translation style guide, and its purpose is to prevent that. It gives everyone a common voice to work from. Because you obviously want the product to read like it comes from one place, not a patchwork of individual writing habits, right? So keep reading as we walk you through how to create a style guide.
How to craft a translation style guide
In short, your translation style guide should contain the following information:
- Target audience and context: audience persona, content type, purpose and tone.
- Brand and linguistic preferences: brand messaging, terminology, language variant, style.
- Localization and cultural considerations.
- Grammar, mechanics, formatting.
- Workflow and references.
Purpose
Many style guides start with an explanation. You’re stated what this guide is for and who should use it. If the purpose is concrete, the guide becomes something your translators can rely on to make decisions confidently. Skip this step or keep it vague, and the rest of your rules won’t feel nearly as impactful.
In this initial step, you also define who the guide is for and how it should be used. A style guide for in-house linguists reads differently than one meant for external vendor translators. If your team includes reviewers, editors, localization project managers, or engineers inserting copy into UI components, make it clear that this document informs their decisions too.
Target audience
This is where you clarify who the final content is speaking to. Your translators have the task of shaping communication for real people with expectations, habits, frustrations, and cultural backgrounds. They don’t know who those people are unless you tell them. And you should be able to describe the audience in human terms, not just marketing demographics.
This section of the style guide is also where you discuss any cultural considerations. Is your brand looking to adapt to the local communication norms or would you rather preserve the original brand tone even when it diverges from local convention? Neither approach is inherently correct, but the translator needs to know which approach your product is taking in order to stay consistent.
Formality, tone, and voice
In this part of the style translation style guide, you tell the translators how the product should speak. You could say it defines the personality your brand expresses through language. Plus, it gives translators a way to make decisions when the source text alone doesn’t provide enough guidance.
Since you don’t want to be too vague, as each translator might interpret a word differently, it’s always best to give examples. Like a short source sentence with a translation that captures the intended tone and another translation that nails the meaning but feels wrong tonally. Explain why that one version works best.
Grammar and writing conventions
You might say that linguistic rules are kind of insignificant, but they are the ones that make the content feel consistent when you’re dealing with hundreds or thousands of strings handled by different translators over time. Things like punctuation spacing, capitalization choices, and preferred verb forms do matter.
When it comes to the sentence structure, this is where the translators often have to decide between concise expressions and more descriptive ones. Some brands favor concision, others a slightly more explanatory tone. Whichever you prefer, your guide should explain which direction to lean, and under what circumstances exceptions apply.
Punctuation and formatting conventions should align not only with linguistic norms, but with what your users expect to see from a polished, trustworthy product. You should also clarify capitalization rules. Many brands have distinctive capitalization patterns in a certain language, but these patterns may not transfer neatly to other languages.
And again, do include examples. Show how dates should look when embedded in a sentence, show the preferred formatting for numbers in financial statements versus interface text. Provide a before-and-after examples of incorrect writing conventions versus the correct applications.
Terminology
Let’s talk about words. Terminology is just a fancy way of saying the specific names we give to our features, user actions, workflows, and different product states. This vocabulary is the foundation for how users make sense of and interact with our product. It’s the key to consistent translation! Because getting the names right is a big deal, we need to give it its own space, totally separate from our tone or grammar rules. Here, we’ll define the official names for everything and spell out exactly how strict we need to be about using them consistently.
Start by taking an inventory of the key concepts that pop up again and again in your product and documentation. Think of things like UI labels, internal workings (your business model vocabulary), platform names, and any branded phrases. Once you’ve identified this entire list, your next step is to define the preferred translation for each term in the target language. And don’t forget to add a short note explaining why that specific translation was chosen; this context is priceless for future translators.
Translation style guide template
Here’s a template that could serve as an example to anyone who’s never created a style guide before.
✍️ Purpose and scope
- Description
- Intended users
✍️ Target audience
- Demographics
- Tone preference
✍️ Tone and voice
- Voice characteristics
- What to avoid
✍️ Grammar, spelling, conventions
- Formality:
- Punctuation:
- Numbers, dates, units
✍️ Terminology (glossary)
✍️ Rules by content type
- UI:
- Marketing
- Technical
✍️ Formatting and styling rules
- Bold/Italic
- Quotes:
- Hyperlinks
- Headings
✍️ Cultural and localization considerations
✍️ Examples (Do/Don’t)
What about when you’re working with AI translators?
If you’re using an AI translator, it’s even more important to have a translation style guide. AI models are good at producing fluent text, but they don’t know your brand, your audience, or your product unless you tell them.
When you work with AI, you use the style guide in two ways:
- You feed the style guide into the prompt. The clearer and more example-based your guide is, the better AI responds. Think of it as training context.
- You use the style guide as a review reference. After the model produces a translation, you evaluate the output against the guide: Did it use the right tone? Did it follow the glossary? Did it respect formatting rules?
A translation style guide is a work in progress
As your product grows and your brand matures, you’ll likely roll out shiny new features (and new jargon!), and your guide will have to keep up with all of that. In other words, you’ll have to maintain a document that stays supremely useful every single day. As such, you need a plan. Decide who owns the updates, how often revisions happen, and, most importantly, how feedback is collected.
Encourage your translators to flag unclear wording, suggest better terminology, or point out where tone guidance doesn’t match actual product usage. It’s a good way to get better insights and a stronger guide. Don’t think of consistency as something that freezes in place.