Swiss, Belgian and pan-European teams brief across languages every day. The failures are consistent — and mostly preventable at brief stage.
A Swiss agency routinely runs a project where the client writes in German, the creative team works in English, the copy ships in French and Italian, and the legal review happens in German again. Every handover is a translation, and every translation is a place where meaning changes.
The failures are consistent enough to be worth naming.
A single-minded proposition is a logical statement and generally travels intact. Tone of voice is carried by register, formality and idiom — none of which map cleanly between languages.
German has a formality decision in every sentence that English does not. French has a register distinction that English handles with word choice. Italian brand language tolerates a warmth that reads as overwrought in German. A tone brief written in English and applied to four languages will produce four different brands.
The fix is to brief tone per language, with one rewritten example sentence in each. It takes fifteen minutes and it is the highest-return fifteen minutes in a multilingual project.
German runs roughly 10–35% longer than English. French runs longer still. Italian is variable. A headline that fits an out-of-home format in English will not fit in German, and the discovery usually happens at artwork stage.
Brief the character limit, not just the message. Design to the longest language and let the shorter ones breathe, rather than designing to English and squeezing.
Translation renders the same words. Adaptation — transcreation, if you must — recreates the effect, which often means different words. Briefs that ask for "translation" when they mean "adaptation" get literal renderings of wordplay, and everybody is disappointed.
Name which one you want per deliverable. Where you want adaptation, brief the intent behind the line, not only the line.
Each market adds a reviewer. Four markets means four legal opinions, four tone preferences and four sets of local mandatories. Sequential approval across four markets is a fortnight, not a Tuesday.
Build the real chain into the timeline at brief stage, and give each market a defined scope of review. "Review for local legal and factual accuracy" prevents the market lead from also rewriting the headline — which is otherwise what happens, in four languages, in parallel.
The instinct is to write four briefs, one per market. It creates four documents that drift. The better pattern is one brief with market-specific sections: shared strategy, local mandatories, local tone notes, local deadlines.
That way the strategy has one version, and when it changes, it changes once.