Why Global Brands Need More Than Google Translate

At Ministry of Sound, we had a house-music brand called Housexy.

The name joined house and sexy, which made reasonable sense in English and looked rather good on a nightclub flyer. I was later told that, when heard in Chinese, it could be broken into sounds meaning something like “hi, eat, shit”.

It is an excellent story. There is only one problem: it is not an accurate translation.

In Mandarin, “eat shit” is chī shǐ. The closer association to sexy is hàosè, which dictionaries translate more like “lustful” or “lecherous”. That is still not necessarily where every brand wants to arrive, but it is a different problem.

This correction does not make the anecdote less useful. It makes it more useful. The story travelled because it sounded plausible, not because anybody had checked the language. In other words, a translation story was itself lost in translation.

For International Translation Day 2026, whose theme is linguistic diversity and language rights, it is worth asking what global marketers actually need. The answer is more than a tool that replaces one set of words with another. We need to transfer meaning.

“Sharing Is Caring” – Until It Is a B2B Campaign

I encountered a different version of the problem at Arjowiggins.

A French campaign was proposed around the line “Sharing Is Caring”. The phrase is perfectly clear in English. It is warm, positive and easy to understand. In Britain, however, it also sounds like something said to a group of five-year-olds while attempting to prevent a dispute over the last biscuit.

As the platform for a full-scale B2B campaign, it felt wrong. Nothing had been mistranslated. The words had arrived intact; the tone had not.

This is the category of error that automated translation struggles to expose. A system may confirm that the grammar works and that the phrase means what the writer intended. It cannot reliably tell you that your British audience will hear a primary-school instruction rather than a sophisticated commercial proposition.

The French team was not being foolish. They were working with a phrase whose cultural weight differed between markets. That distinction matters because international marketing is not domestic marketing with translated copy.

Translation, Localisation and Transcreation Are Different Jobs

The terms are often used as though they describe the same process. They do not.

A product instruction may need faithful translation. An ecommerce page needs localisation. A slogan, joke or emotionally loaded campaign may need transcreation.

The more creative the source material, the less likely a word-for-word rendering is to preserve it. Puns depend on sound. Humour depends on shared knowledge. Status depends on social convention. Even a simple word such as “premium” can signal quality in one market and empty marketing language in another.

This is why a translator should not receive only a document. They need the audience, channel, objective, brand voice and context. Without that information, they are being asked to reproduce a decision they were never shown.

My Professional Relationship With Franglais

At Arjowiggins, I spent a great deal of time working between French and English. Some copy arrived in a form we called “Franglais”: English words arranged in a way that made grammatical sense, but carried the unmistakable rhythm and structure of French.

You could understand it. You could also tell immediately that an English-speaking person had not written it.

My French was good enough to make an effort and not good enough to sustain the illusion for long. In Paris taxis, I would begin in French and the driver would usually switch to English. In meetings, I would try again and somebody would politely say, “Don’t worry, we can speak English.”

This was generous of them and slightly embarrassing for me. International cooperation occasionally meant an entire room of French people abandoning their first language because one British marketer had arrived with GCSE-adjacent confidence.

It did not put me off. It taught me some humility. The fact that I could understand a French sentence did not make me the best person to judge how a French customer would hear it. Fluency is not only vocabulary. It includes the invisible knowledge of what sounds natural, formal, childish, fashionable, blunt or ridiculous.

That experience is part of what I explored in what working in Paris taught me as a British marketer. Culture affected the meetings, the relationships, the organisation and, yes, the length of lunch. It was never confined to the translated document.

Why the Local Merchant Was Part of the Marketing Team

My role at Arjowiggins included coordinating translations for merchant markets in places including Thailand and Mauritius.

The initial translation would be completed, but the local merchants then checked it. That additional stage was essential. They knew the language, but they also knew the customers, category and commercial environment.

A local reviewer can spot whether terminology is technically accurate but uncommon in the industry. They can recognise when a formal phrase sounds cold, when a claim is culturally awkward or when a brand name invites an unintended reading. They may also understand local sensitivities that a central team has no reason to anticipate.

This was not simply proofreading. It was distributed market intelligence.

The strongest international process therefore combines central consistency with local authority. The centre protects the brand and objective. The local market protects relevance and meaning — something the practical realities of marketing in Russia illustrate particularly well. If either side has absolute control, something important can be lost.

The Internet’s Favourite Translation Disasters Need Translating Too

Lists of international branding mistakes are wonderfully shareable. They are also full of examples that become less true every time they are copied.

The Chevrolet Nova is the classic. The story claims Spanish-speaking buyers avoided the car because no va means “doesn’t go”. It is memorable, neat and widely repeated. It is also not supported by the sales history or how Spanish speakers understood the name.

Reality still provides enough genuine examples. When Amazon launched its Swedish site in 2020, machine-translated listings reportedly produced vulgar, confusing and offensive descriptions. IKEA has employed Thai linguists to review product names because harmless Scandinavian words could resemble sexual expressions in Thai.

These stories reveal two risks. The first is failing to check the language. The second is using a famous “failure” in a presentation because everybody else has, without checking whether it happened.

Marketers should be professionally suspicious of anecdotes that are too perfect. Housexy taught me that as effectively as any academic framework could.

Google Translate Is Much Better Than It Used to Be

My strongest memories of Google Translate come from an earlier generation of the product, when the result could be understandable without ever feeling quite right.

The technology has advanced enormously. Google moved from phrase-based systems towards neural machine translation, which considers more of the sentence and produces more natural output. Current AI systems can use wider context, accept detailed instructions and revise their work. For everyday comprehension, first drafts and high-volume internal material, that is genuinely valuable.

I have not personally used AI very much for translation, so I would not pretend otherwise. My experience comes from coordinating human translation and reviewing copy across markets. From that perspective, the improvement in the tools does not remove the need for judgement. It changes where human judgement is most valuable.

Machine translation can help a marketer understand the gist, prepare a draft, compare alternatives and identify obvious inconsistencies. It becomes riskier when the copy is public, persuasive, legally sensitive, highly visible or central to the brand.

AI also faces the same underlying problem as any translator: context. Is “bold” describing a font, a flavour or a brand personality? Is the audience a consumer, engineer or procurement director? Is a line meant to be funny? What must remain identical and what can change completely?

A tool cannot infer a brief that nobody supplied.

A Practical Workflow for Global Campaigns

The answer is not to avoid machine translation or send every social caption through a six-month diplomatic process. It is to match the level of review to the level of risk.

For high-value work, I would use the following sequence:

• Write a translation brief covering the audience, purpose, tone, channel and non-negotiable brand elements.
• Create the first translation with a qualified linguist or an appropriately supervised tool.
• Ask a native speaker to review naturalness, not merely accuracy.
• Give a local marketer, merchant or customer-facing colleague authority to challenge the commercial effect.
• Back-translate critical claims where accuracy matters, and test important names or slogans with the intended audience.
• Record approved terminology so the brand becomes more consistent with every campaign.

The cost looks inconvenient until compared with printing thousands of brochures, launching a site or placing media behind a phrase that makes the market laugh for the wrong reason.

Global Consistency Does Not Mean Identical Words

International brands often worry that local adaptation will weaken consistency. Sometimes the reverse is true.

If a humorous English line becomes stiff in French, preserving the wording does not preserve the brand. If a warm French phrase sounds childish in Britain, using the same idea does not create the same effect. Consistency should be judged against the brand’s intention, not the surface structure of the sentence.

The strategic centre should define what must travel: the positioning, promise, evidence, personality and desired response. Local teams should then have room to decide how those things are expressed.

This is the same tension between theory and execution I discuss in marketing thought and marketing practice. “Be consistent” is sound strategic advice. Applied without judgement, it can produce consistently unnatural marketing in fifteen languages.

Good localisation does not make a brand less global. It makes the brand capable of being understood globally.

The Power of Being Understood

The official 2026 International Translation Day theme includes a useful phrase: “the power of being understood”. That is a more ambitious objective than converting words.

At Ministry of Sound, the Housexy story showed how quickly people invent meaning around unfamiliar sounds. At Arjowiggins, “Sharing Is Caring” showed that familiar words can acquire the wrong tone. Franglais showed that a sentence can be comprehensible without feeling native. The merchants in Thailand and Mauritius showed why local knowledge completes the work.

Google Translate and modern AI can do extraordinary things. They can reduce friction, open access to information and give marketers a far better starting point than we had years ago.

But a global brand is not merely trying to be decoded. It is trying to be recognised, trusted, remembered and chosen.

That requires translation. It also requires context, cultural intelligence, local authority and the occasional willingness to admit that the funny story you have been telling for years needs a correction.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the difference between translation and localisation?

Translation changes text from one language to another. Localisation adapts the wider experience for a market, including terminology, spelling, formats, currency, imagery and cultural conventions.

What is transcreation?

Transcreation recreates the intended emotional or persuasive effect rather than translating every word literally. It is particularly useful for slogans, humour, brand campaigns and creative copy.

Can brands use Google Translate or AI for marketing copy?

Yes, particularly for comprehension, research and first drafts. Public-facing or high-risk copy should still be reviewed by a fluent local expert who understands the audience, category and brand objective.

Does Housexy mean “high, eat, shit” in Chinese?

No. That is a memorable folk explanation rather than an accurate translation. The closer Mandarin association is with language meaning lustful or lecherous, while “eat shit” is a different phrase. The confusion is itself a useful warning about unchecked translation stories.