The minimum viable translator: what kind of talent do we need to build multilingual brands?
A key step in ‘going international’ or expanding into a foreign-language market tends to involve buying translation services of some kind. In the old days, this meant finding a translation agency. More recently, AI tools have started to look more and more suitable. Both the old way (translation agency) and the new way (AI) leave a serious and under-recognised quality gap for smaller companies: they assume that you, the client, will determine the quality of the translations you buy. The idea is that you have an internal native speaker of the target language – such as a country marketing manager – who’ll check and fix copy when it’s off-brand, off-brief or simply not correct.
Can you wait until there’s headcount to hire for this role? No – you need good quality translations now. So, the secret is to find the freelance version of this person: a bilingual copywriter, or copy lead.
I work with people like this every day and they’re hands down the most important factor in successful multilingual expansion. I’ve lost count of the times my client has said “I’m so happy we found X” after a copy lead has found a way forward when globally-produced assets don’t quite work for their market or caught a potentially embarrassing cultural misalignment well in advance.
And most importantly: those are just the problems we’ve heard about. The true value of the copy lead can’t be quantified because creating an entire brand experience in another language means daily creative decisions that only they can make. It’s a nuance-filled activity that needs the X factor known in the trade as ‘chops’.
They’re not just good creatives, though. Unlike a translator with a traditional industry profile, the copy lead comes from an ad agency or marketing background and is accustomed to working further upstream. Their strategic understanding means that you can trust they copy they deliver and they can also set you up for repeatable, scalable success in their language. This looks like:
Clearly assessing how your brand and its assets should be positioned in their culture and language and making the necessary adjustments at a conceptual level
Writing down guardrails for the brand voice in their language (as well as a glossary of terms) to help the whole company and partners (including AI) stay consistent
Asking for what they need (such as visual context, customer insights, product details) while gathering their own intel about your audience in their language
Not needing a brief for every piece of copy, because they know how to adapt to different channels
Investing their time in high impact, hard-to-translate copy and seeking more cost-effective solutions (such as AI) for lower-impact, easy-to-translate copy
This all makes the copy lead easy to work with, too, which is partly why it’s such a relief when they join the team. You’re getting a protective layer, a sounding board and a bringer of insights, ideas and opportunities you’d otherwise miss. Really good translators can also do this but the traditional way of buying translations has meant that their value has been boxed away in the execution phase. Now that AI is taking on more execution work, the true strategic value of good translation is becoming clearer. Experiments with AI tend to underline that copywriting isn’t ‘just’ writing words, likewise localisation was never about just translating them. Hiring a human being who knows what you’re trying to do, not just what you want to say, is probably the best investment you can make.