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Sixteen Languages, One Company
Translating your tone is the wrong goal and produces a company that sounds slightly foreign in fifteen places. What has to be identical, what is allowed to differ, and who checks a language nobody in the office reads.
Costa4 min read
Short answer
Do not translate your tone of voice. Fix the decisions instead: what gets promised, what gets refused, how much is said before a person is involved, and the level of formality appropriate to that language. A company reads as consistent when its behaviour is identical across languages, not when its adjectives are.
Key facts
- The same rules, limits and handover triggers apply in every language the assistant answers in.
- Formality is set per language rather than copied from the source language.
- Terms with legal or contractual weight are fixed per language and not left to the model.
- Every language is reviewed by somebody who actually speaks it before it goes live.
A business that answers in sixteen languages faces a question it never had before: whether it sounds like the same company in all of them.
The instinct is to translate the tone of voice. It is the wrong goal, and pursuing it produces a company that sounds slightly foreign in fifteen places at once.
What does not survive translation
Tone is made of things that do not have equivalents. Contractions, sentence length, how much warmth is carried by word choice against how much by grammar, whether an exclamation mark reads as friendly or as shouting.
A short, dry English sentence that reads as confident becomes curt in Portuguese and rude in Russian. A warm Spanish greeting rendered literally into English sounds like a mailing list. There is no setting that fixes this, because the thing being copied is not a property of the message.
Three things that must be identical
What the company promises. If the English answer commits to a date and the Spanish one hedges it, you are two companies, and eventually somebody puts screenshots side by side.
What it refuses. The limits list is not a language feature. A refund request handled by a person in one language and by a friendly paragraph in another is the same defect as having two prices.
When a person appears. The trigger, the threshold and the wording of the handover are identical everywhere. A customer writing in Greek should reach a human at exactly the same point in the conversation as a customer writing in English, and this is the one people forget, because the Greek queue is usually thinner and the temptation to let the assistant go further is real.
What is allowed to differ
Formality, and it must differ.
There is no universal middle register. Some languages have a default that is warmer than English, some have a formal address that is required rather than optional, and a few draw the line by age or context in a way no translation carries. Choosing the level per language is a decision made once, by somebody who speaks it, and it is the single thing that most affects whether an assistant sounds like a company or like software.
Sentence length differs too, and should. So does how much gets said before asking a question.
The formality trap
The specific mistake is copying the source language's register into all sixteen, and it always goes in the same direction: English sets the default, so the whole system lands somewhere between informal and neutral.
In half the languages that is fine. In the rest it reads as either presumptuous or oddly cold, and neither is a complaint anybody bothers to make. They just answer more briefly, and nobody ever finds out why.
Who reviews a language nobody here reads
One hour from somebody who speaks it, before launch, reading twenty real answers rather than a glossary.
Not a translation review. A read for whether this sounds like a company you would buy from, and specifically whether the address form is right and whether anything reads as trying too hard. Twenty answers is enough; the errors are systematic rather than scattered, so they show up in the first five.
We apply this to ourselves with mixed success. The Spanish and Portuguese on this site were written by someone who works in them without living in them, and both are on the list for exactly the pass described above.
Where the voice actually comes from
Not from adjectives. From what the business does at the moments that matter.
Answering at 02:14. Saying it is listed as available rather than it is available. Stopping at money. Naming the person who is taking over and giving a time. Those read identically in every language because they are behaviour rather than phrasing, and they are what a customer means when they say a company felt like it had its act together.
Get those right and a reasonable register per language, and Social AI and Omni AI will sound like one company in sixteen. Get the adjectives right and the behaviour wrong and you have sixteen well-written strangers.
Questions this raises
- Can we just write the English and have it translated?
- For the facts, yes. For the register, no. English defaults to a middle formality that reads as cold in some languages and presumptuous in others, and the fix is one decision per language rather than a better translation.
- What about our brand words?
- Keep the ones that are names and fix a translation for the ones that are terms. The failure mode is a document type or service name that comes back differently in three conversations, which makes a customer doubt they are dealing with one company.
- Nobody here reads Greek. How do we check it?
- One paid hour from somebody who does, before launch, reading twenty real answers rather than a word list. It is the cheapest quality step in the whole project and the one most often skipped.