Mirela
When it comes to global branding, you’ll find that words themselves aren’t the hardest part. It’s actually keeping your voice alive across borders that’s difficult. In this article, we’ll walk you through how to create a voice and tone guide that keeps your brand consistent even when you go beyond your boarders.
Voice and tone are not the same
Your brand voice is the constant. It’s your brand’s personality, the thing that’s steady, recognizable, and consistent across all content and all languages. Your tone, on the other hand, shifts depending on the context. It’s how your voice adapts to different situations, because you can’t use the same tone for everything.
In localization, it’s very important we distinguish between these two terms because tone varies even more dramatically across cultures. You need to spell out the difference to help your translators understand what should stay fixed (voice) and what they can adjust (tone).
Your core brand personality
You know how your brand is, but others don’t. And this is where you start, with making everything clear, because what you view as obvious can become open to interpretation. Is your brand bold and confident? Warm and supportive? Minimalist and straightforward? Sophisticated and expert? Identify its personality traits and go deeper by explaining what each trait means in practice. Your localization team will rely heavily on these definitions, because cultural norms influence how traits are expressed.
One of the most often‑cited examples of a clear brand voice and tone guide comes from Mailchimp’s Content Style Guide. Their voice and tone section reads like a conversation about how to be human on the internet, and that’s part of why it works so well.
Explain what your voice looks like in action
Now we’re getting to the core of your guide. Translators want (and need) to see what “sounds like you” and what doesn’t, and the best way to help them out is by giving a few before-and-after examples in your source language.
We’re talking on-brand vs. off-brand sentence samples, rewritten lines that show the voice in different tones, real examples pulled from your existing product copy or marketing content, and whatever else might be relevant.
You could demonstrate how you phrase API documentation intros, how you announce updates, how you guide users through onboarding flows, or how you write microcopy (like button text, hints, and tooltips). Examples help localization experts make decisions when there’s more than one way to translate something (which is… almost always).
Address users’ expectations
When you’re expanding into new markets, you walk into cultures with their own “rules” like different rhythms, values, humor. Those lines that sound so good in the source language sometimes don’t translate all that great in the target language. Some words may not even be translatable.
It’s because of this that your brand voice guide needs to give localization teams more than a set of stylistic preferences. This guide can be seen as a map, so mark out the places where your voice must remain unwavering and the areas where adaptation is necessary.
The most important thing is to define what cannot change, like your brand’s core personality, and what should change to respect cultural reality of the new audience you’re speaking to. Your translators will likely need to adapt metaphors that don’t translate well, to smooth out jokes that won’t make sense, to choose formality levels, and more.
Create clear language preferences and rules
The guide should also contain a part that covers the everyday writing choices that shape your brand’s recognizable sound. Localization teams face these decisions constantly, so it’s important to document your preferences to prevent inconsistencies.
Explain elements like:
- Sentence structure
- Complexity
- Formality
- Use of contractions
- Humor and slang
- Punctuation
- Emojis
Include notes about domain-specific terminology
In multilingual projects, terminology is maybe the biggest source of inconsistency. You want features, components, concepts, and UI elements to be described the same way every time.
Your voice and tone guide should either include or link to:
- A glossary of key terms
- Definitions and usage notes
- Instructions about capitalization and grammar
- Whether terms should be translated or kept as-is
- When to use abbreviations or full names
Platforms like POEditor make this easy by keeping glossaries and notes directly inside the translation interface; your terminology rules will appear exactly when translators need them.
Help your team understand your different content types
As we mentioned previously, your brand voice stays consistent across content, but your tone shifts depending on the context. To avoid yet another type of confusion, guide your localization teams through the different content types they’ll encounter. They’ll have to translate everything from product UI to marketing copy and alerts, and you’ll have to explain the tone expectations for each category so that your translators are able to reference a clear set of instructions.
If you’re looking for addition inspiration, check out Atlassian. Their guide breaks down its voice and tone principles and explains when and how each principle should be applied in the context of user emotions or product moments.
How to apply your voice and tone guide inside the workflow
A guide is only useful if people can actually use it, and you can make your guide practical in a few simple ways:
- Add per-string context notes in your translation platform.
- Use comment threads to clarify ambiguous or high-importance strings.
- Link your glossary to the translation interface.
- Keep all your instructions centralized and visible in POEditor.
- Mark strings that require strict adherence to brand voice.
- Make tone rules accessible right next to the string editor.
When you pair a clear guide with a platform like POEditor where context, instructions, glossaries, and collaboration come together, you are able to create a workflow where brand consistency becomes the default.