Article
Glossary-first: keeping your brand voice in a language you don't speak
Your tone of voice took years to build. Without a glossary, it takes one freelancer to lose it.
The drift problem
Every translator, tool and agency makes a hundred tiny choices per page. Without a shared reference, those choices compound into drift: your bestseller sounds premium in English, cheerful in German, and apologetic in French. Customers can't name it, but they feel it — the way you feel a stranger wearing your clothes.
What a glossary actually is
Not a word list. A decision record: which terms are yours, which phrases are banned, how formal you are, when humor is allowed, what you never promise. Forty to sixty entries covers 90% of a DTC store. It takes one structured interview to build and it pays back on every future page, email and ad.
Why we sign it off before writing
A glossary the client hasn't approved is a wish list. Once you sign it, it becomes the contract: disputes about wording stop being about taste and start being about the table we both agreed to. It's the single mechanism that makes a 10-day sprint safe for a brand that took years to build.