Brand voice

Generic machine translation produces text that is correct and sounds like nobody. It flattens a friendly second-person site into corporate third-person prose, drops your contractions, and turns your product names into descriptions of your product names.

A voice profile is the instruction set that stops that happening. It travels with every unit we translate for your project.

What is in a profile

Brand identity. Who you are, who you are talking to, and what you sound like. This is prose, not settings - the more specific it is, the more useful. "Casual, like a knowledgeable local friend, for travellers aged 18 to 35" beats "friendly and professional", which describes almost every company that has ever existed.

Per-language guidance. Tone does not translate one-to-one. German has a formal and an informal register and you must pick one. Italian marketing copy tolerates warmth that would read as unprofessional in Dutch. Each target language gets its own notes.

Rules for body content and for metadata separately. A page title has 60 characters and an SEO job; a paragraph has room to breathe. They should not be written to the same brief.

Protected terms - your glossary. See below.

What you write, and what we handle

You write the content of your voice: identity, tone, rules, the things only you know.

The structure around it - the output contract, the formatting rules, the instructions that keep markup and shortcodes intact - is ours, and it is applied consistently to every profile. That split matters: when we improve how translations are constrained, every project gets the improvement without anyone editing their profile.

You will not find placeholder tokens or fencing syntax in a profile, and they are rejected if you try to add them. Write prose.

Generating a profile from your website

Writing a good voice brief from a blank page is hard. You can instead give us your website URL and pick your target languages, and get a complete draft back: brand identity, per-language guidance, and a glossary of terms found on your site.

How it works:

1. We discover and read a sample of your pages.
2. Those pages are analysed to produce a voice description and a candidate glossary.
3. You review the draft and apply it, in whole or in part.

It is a starting point, not an answer. Read it before applying it. It will usually get your tone roughly right and will sometimes propose glossary terms you do not want frozen. Editing a good draft is far quicker than writing from nothing.

There is a per-day limit on generations, and you are shown a cost estimate before one runs.

Protected terms (the glossary)

A glossary term is a word or phrase that must survive translation unchanged. Your company name. Your product names. Place names you use in a particular form.

Without this, "Nest Pass" becomes "Nido Pase" in Spanish, and it does so convincingly - the translation is grammatically perfect and completely wrong.

Protected terms are handled twice: declared to the model before translation, and verified afterwards. A translation that lost a protected term does not silently ship.

Two details worth knowing:

• Protection applies to visible text. A term appearing inside a CSS class name or a URL is left alone - rewriting it there would break your page rather than protect your brand.
• Import your existing list. If you already maintain a glossary in WPML, you can import it as a CSV rather than retyping it.

Getting a voice right

Start from real copy. Take two paragraphs from your site that sound exactly like you, and describe why they sound like you - that description is your profile.

Then translate five representative pages and read the output in a language you actually speak. Adjust, and only then run the rest. A voice profile improved after five pages is worth far more than one theorised before the first.

Changing your voice does not retroactively re-translate existing content - see Why the second run costs less for why, and what to do when you want it applied anyway.