How to Write a Translation Style Guide for Your Videos

What a style guide records that a glossary doesn't

A glossary answers "what is this word in Japanese?" A style guide answers "how do we talk to Japanese viewers?" The two belong together, but they solve different problems. Terms are lookups. Style is a set of policies: the level of politeness, whether you convert units, what happens to a joke that doesn't travel, which voice narrates the series.

Without a written guide, those policies live in one person's head, or nowhere. The symptoms are familiar: episode 3 addresses German viewers with "du" and episode 7 switches to "Sie", a product name is translated in one video and kept in English in the next, and a new reviewer "fixes" decisions the last reviewer made on purpose.

If you haven't built a term list yet, start with the method in translating names and technical terms. The style guide then points to that list instead of repeating it.

The decisions worth writing down

Most of the reasoning behind these decisions is covered elsewhere. Formality, grammatical gender and pronouns are explained in context in machine translation, and units, dates, humor and idioms in cultural adaptation in video. The guide doesn't need that background. It needs the outcome, stated as a rule a reviewer can apply in seconds:

• Audience: who watches, what they already know, and what reading level the subtitles should assume.
• Register: formal or informal address, per language, with one example sentence.
• Terminology: a link to the glossary, plus a short do-not-translate list for brand, product and feature names.
• Names: how people, places and organizations are written, especially across scripts.
• Numbers, units, dates and currency: convert, keep or show both.
• Humor, idioms and cultural references: adapt, explain or drop.
• Subtitle conventions: punctuation, numerals, how to handle on-screen text the speaker doesn't read aloud.
• Voice: which narrator voice the series uses in each language and why.

Anything that doesn't change a reviewer's decision stays out. "Be clear and engaging" is not a rule anyone can check.

Writing the register rule for each language

Register is where guides most often fail, because the source language may not mark it at all. English "you" says nothing about formality, so the translation engine has to pick, and it may pick differently from one chunk of a video to the next. Your guide removes the choice.

Write one line per target language, and include an example sentence taken from your own content:

• German: address viewers with "Sie". Example: "Klicken Sie auf Speichern."
• French: "vous" throughout, including in calls to action.
• Spanish (Latin America): "tú" for the creator channel, "usted" for customer training.
• Japanese: polite desu/masu forms; no casual endings even in jokes.

Two register decisions are easy to forget. First, a single brand can need different registers for different content types, as in the Spanish line above. Second, register applies to the voice track as much as to subtitles, because the dubbed narration speaks exactly the translated text.

Numbers, units, names and the do-not-translate list

Policies for concrete things work best as a two-column table. A reviewer scanning a transcript can check each row without interpretation:

Prices

Keep the original currency; use the target language's decimal and thousands separators

Measurements

Convert in subtitles for metric markets only when the number matters to the viewer

Dates

Write in the target language's usual order; spell out the month when ambiguous

Product names

Never translate; keep original capitalization

Feature names

Translate only if the interface itself is localized; otherwise keep English and add nothing

People's names

Keep original spelling in Latin scripts; use the established transliteration in other scripts

Acronyms

Keep the English acronym unless a local one is standard in the field

Keep the do-not-translate list short and literal: exact spellings, one per line. If it grows past a dozen entries, move it into the glossary and link it.

Subtitle and voice conventions

Subtitle rules in a style guide should describe the finished file, not the tool. Useful rules include: numerals or words for small numbers, quotation mark style for the language (French guillemets, German low-high quotes), whether to keep filler words, and what to do when the speaker refers to text on screen that viewers can't read in their language.

Line length is the one rule that depends on your workflow. If your subtitle files come out with one line per cue and your platform or client expects two-line cues under a character limit, the guide should say who splits them and with what tool. The walk-through on how to edit an SRT file covers that step.

For voice, record the chosen narrator per language and keep it for the whole series. Viewers notice when the voice of a channel changes between episodes far more than they notice a slightly imperfect word choice.

A one-page template to copy

Paste this structure into a shared document and fill one copy per target language. Keep each answer to a line or two:

1. Content and audience: series name, content type, who watches, assumed knowledge.
2. Register: formal or informal, plus one example sentence from your own script.
3. Glossary link and do-not-translate list: exact spellings only.
4. Names policy: Latin-script names, non-Latin transliteration, titles and honorifics.
5. Numbers, units, dates, currency: one rule each.
6. Humor, idioms and references: adapt, explain or drop, with one example.
7. Subtitle conventions: punctuation, numerals, on-screen text, line splitting.
8. Voice: narrator voice and regional variant, if any.
9. Known exceptions: decisions that break the rules on purpose, with the reason.
10. Version and owner: date, version number, and who approves changes.

How reviewers put the guide to work

A guide only earns its keep if reviewers use it during the pass, not after it. A practical routine:

1. Send the guide with the files: the translated SRT, the translated transcript and the source video. If you are still looking for someone to review, finding a reviewer for AI translation covers who to ask and how to brief them.
2. Ask for one quick pass for register and terminology first, using search: every "du" in a "Sie" guide, every translated product name.
3. Then a full read for meaning, using the guide only when a decision comes up.
4. Have the reviewer log every place they broke a rule on purpose, with a one-line reason.
5. After each video, decide whether those exceptions should become rules, and bump the version number if anything changes.

The editing itself follows the usual order of meaning first and polish last, described in machine translation post-editing.

Mistakes that make style guides useless

• Too long. A 30-page brand manual is not read during a subtitle pass. One page per language, with links for depth.
• Adjectives instead of rules. "Warm, confident, professional" gives a reviewer nothing to check. "Second person, no exclamation marks" does.
• No examples. A register rule without a sample sentence gets interpreted in several ways.
• One guide for all languages. Register, quotation marks, number formats and name handling differ by language, so the decisions do too.
• Never updated. If reviewers keep logging the same exception, the guide is wrong, not the reviewers.
• Written for the machine. A style guide is for the people who check and edit the output; no current tool reads your preferences off a page and applies them reliably.

Using a style guide with mydubly

mydubly has no field for uploading a glossary or style rules, so the translation it produces is a draft made without your guide. The guide applies during review. A job gives you the files a reviewer needs: a timestamped transcript, subtitles as SRT and VTT in the spoken or target language, an optional translated transcript, and for dubbing, a translated voice track and video.

A few guide entries map directly to choices you make when starting a job. The voice section maps to one of eight stock voices, and one voice speaks the whole video. The regional section maps to the Spanish (Latin America or Spain) and Portuguese (Brazil or Portugal) voice variants. Some fixed facts belong in the guide so reviewers aren't surprised: Chinese output is Simplified, Arabic is Modern Standard Arabic, and Norwegian is Bokmål. Text on screen is not translated, and the dubbed MP4 removes the original speech, including any singing, while keeping the original music and effects underneath.

Because each subtitle job produces one track in one language, your guide should be per language anyway, which matches how the files arrive. To produce subtitles in another language, run the file again; a 10-minute video costs 10 credits (1¢) for the transcript and subtitles. The video translator and subtitle generator pages describe the outputs in more detail.

Write version one this week

Pick the language you translate into most often and fill in the template from the next video you publish, not from theory. You will discover the real decisions as the reviewer hits them. After three or four videos the guide will be stable enough to hand to a second reviewer or a second language. For the wider process around it, the video localization checklist and the video localization overview show where the guide fits.