Brochures and leaflets
Corporate and product brochures, folded leaflets, flyers and exhibition handouts, supplied print-ready.
Translation Services
Brochures, catalogues and product literature in 300+ languages, with transcreation where a literal version would fall flat, and print-ready files your designer can drop straight in.
Brochure translation is the adaptation of printed and marketing material into another language so that it still persuades, not just informs. Prism Linguistics translates brochures, catalogues, product literature, presentations and press material in more than 300 languages, using translators who can write, applying transcreation to headlines and straplines, and returning print-ready files for your design team. Quotes come back within one working hour during office hours.
Your marketing took real effort to get right in English. The version in Spanish, Polish or Arabic deserves the same care, otherwise it quietly undersells you in exactly the market you have just spent money entering. This page covers print and campaign collateral; it sits alongside the rest of our translation services.
Marketing translation is a different job from translating a contract. A contract has to be exact. A brochure has to make somebody want something, and the words that do that in English are rarely the same words that do it in Finnish.
Most of a brochure is body copy: product descriptions, company background, the practical detail a buyer scans for. That can be translated directly, accurately and well, by a native speaker who understands the product. The hard-working ten per cent is different. A headline, a strapline, a pun, a call to action, the caption under the hero image: these carry tone and intent that survive a literal translation about as well as a joke survives being explained.
So we split the copy before we start, and we tell you which is which. It changes the price, it changes the timeline, and it changes who does the work. A translator who is precise and literal is exactly who you want for a datasheet, and exactly who you don't want writing your tagline.
Transcreation means recreating the effect rather than the words. The linguist reads the English, works out what it is doing (making a promise, undercutting a competitor, sounding expensive, sounding friendly), and writes a new line in the target language that does the same job for the same audience.
In practice you get options rather than an answer. For a strapline we'll usually come back with two or three versions plus a plain-English back-translation of each, so you can see what they actually say, and a sentence explaining why one might land better than another in that market. You choose. If you have a local distributor or a regional sales lead, that's the moment to involve them, because they know how the competition talks.
A worked example of the problem: a slogan built on an English pun about "current" for an electrical products range. There is no equivalent double meaning in Polish. A literal translation is meaningless; the transcreated version keeps the confidence and the wit but builds them on something else entirely. That's the trade being made, and it's why transcreation is agreed rather than delivered silently. Our Polish translation services page covers that language pair in more depth.
Rarely just one item. A brochure usually arrives with the family of material that goes with it, and it all needs to sound like the same company.
Corporate and product brochures, folded leaflets, flyers and exhibition handouts, supplied print-ready.
Product catalogues, range guides and price lists, including the repeating product data behind them.
Datasheets, spec sheets, packaging copy, on-pack instructions and point-of-sale material.
Pitch decks, event slides and internal sales enablement material, kept on-message and on-brand.
Customer stories, white papers and brand reports, where credibility depends entirely on the writing.
Press releases, email campaigns, social and advertising copy, and the straplines that hold them together.
Catalogues look like the easiest job on the list and are usually the hardest. The prose is short. The problem is everything around it: hundreds of near-identical product descriptions, sizes and units, material names, certification marks, and a structure where one sloppy term repeats 300 times before anyone notices.
We handle catalogue translation with a glossary agreed up front and a translation memory kept on your account, so "brushed stainless" is the same phrase on page 4 and page 84, and next year's edition only charges you for what changed. Where the catalogue is exported from a product database rather than typed into a layout, tell us at quote stage. It's usually cheaper to translate the data source and re-export than to work on the finished pages, and it keeps your web and print copy in step. A large Spanish translation of a range guide is a very different piece of work depending on which of those two routes you take.
Product literature sits awkwardly between marketing and technical writing, and it has to satisfy both. The headline wants to persuade; the ingredient list, the tolerance figure and the safety symbol have to be exactly right. We treat those as two different tasks on the same file, with the factual content translated precisely and the persuasive content given room.
Packaging brings its own constraint: space. There is a fixed panel and no more, so the translation has to fit rather than simply be correct, which sometimes means rewriting a claim shorter rather than translating it faithfully and hoping the type can be set at 6pt. Tell us the character limit per field and we'll work to it. If the same content also drives an online product page, our website translation service picks it up from there, and heavier technical documentation belongs with document translation.
This is the part that catches people out, and it is entirely predictable. Translated text and the original are almost never the same length. German and Finnish typically run 20 to 35 per cent longer than English. Some languages come out shorter and leave holes. Arabic and Hebrew read right to left, which means the whole grid mirrors: your left-hand image column moves right, and a saddle-stitched booklet effectively reverses its page order.
There are smaller traps too. German compound nouns are long single words that break badly in a narrow column, so they need discretionary hyphens rather than a designer squeezing the tracking. A display font chosen for an English headline may have no Cyrillic or Greek glyphs at all, and may be missing the Polish ogonek, the Czech háček or the Turkish dotless i, which is the kind of thing you want to find out before artwork locks rather than at proof stage. All-caps settings hide diacritics in some languages and look shouty in others.
We flag all of this early. Where it helps, we return the copy with a character count against each English string so your designer can see at a glance which boxes are going to overflow. If you'd rather we did the layout, we work with InDesign (IDML), PDF and the usual design formats and hand back print-ready files.
Print is unforgiving, because a mistake gets multiplied by the print run and there is no quiet fix at midnight. Once pages are laid out we have a linguist read the proof in position, not just the copy in a document. That catches the things a copy review never sees: text overset and truncated in a box, a caption that has drifted away from its photo, a hyphenation break in the wrong place, a phone number reformatted into the wrong national convention. If you want an independent check on a translation you already have, that's our proofreading service.
Brand voice is the thing clients worry about most and brief the least. "Professional but approachable" means very little to a translator sitting in Lyon at nine in the evening, so we ask for something firmer: two or three pieces of English copy you are happy with, any tone-of-voice guidance you have, and a note on how formal you want to be.
That last point does real work. Several languages force a choice the English original never had to make. French has tu and vous, German du and Sie, Spanish tú and usted. Pick the informal register for a German engineering audience and you sound presumptuous; pick the formal one for a youth fashion brand and you sound like a bank. It is a decision, not a translation, and we would rather ask you once than guess across forty pages. Once it's agreed we keep it in your glossary so the next campaign matches, including work in languages with their own conventions such as our Arabic translation services.
Mostly UK companies selling into markets where English will not carry the sale on its own:
That last group is a reminder that multilingual marketing isn't only about export. A council leaflet about a recycling change, or an NHS trust's public health campaign, has to persuade people who live twenty minutes away and read French, Romanian or Urdu at home. Same discipline, different audience. Video and campaign film work is covered by our subtitling service, and app or software interface copy by localisation.
The earlier you bring us in, the more of the layout trouble we can head off.
Send the InDesign package, PDF or Word copy along with your target languages and markets through the quote form. Tell us the audience and the tone you want, and flag any product names, trademarks or legal wording that must stay in English.
We come back within one working hour during office hours with a fixed quote, and we mark which parts are straight translation and which need transcreation. Body copy is priced per word; headlines and straplines are quoted separately.
You review the copy, we finalise it after a second-linguist check, and it goes back to your designer or ours. A linguist then reads the laid-out proof in position before it goes to press.
Body copy is priced per source word, and the rate depends on the language pair and the subject matter, the same as any other written work. Our pricing page publishes the ranges rather than a single figure, because one figure would be wrong for most jobs.
Three further things move a brochure quote. The number of languages, obviously, though the per-language cost usually eases a little once the terminology work is done for the first one. How much of the copy needs transcreation, since a six-word strapline can genuinely take longer than a page of product description and doesn't price sensibly by the word, so we quote that part separately. And whether you want files laid out and proofed as well as translated, or just the copy back in a Word document for your own designer.
Deadlines matter as well. Print dates tend to be fixed months in advance and then everything upstream compresses, so if you already know your press date, say it in the first email. We would rather tell you at quote stage that four languages in five days is not sensible than agree to it and disappoint you later.
Marketing rarely travels alone. Distribution agreements, compliance statements and company paperwork usually follow it into the same market, and those go through document translation. Anything a foreign authority, a court or a UK body has to formally accept needs a signed statement of accuracy, which is certified translation. Both are handled by the same project manager, so you're not repeating yourself.
Send us the brochure or campaign and your target languages. We will quote within one working hour during office hours, and flag anything that needs transcreation rather than translation.