One of the questions we get asked often by clients commissioning animation or film for international audiences is: how do you make content that genuinely works across languages and cultures, rather than just translating a British film and hoping for the best?

It’s a question we’ve spent twenty years developing real answers to, and the productions we’re most proud of in this area demonstrate three distinct approaches, each suited to different briefs.

Designing for language-agnostic distribution

The most demanding multilingual brief is one where the content needs to work across every market without any localisation at all. For the MS International Federation’s Workplace Adaptations series, we removed VoiceOver entirely, designing five animations to communicate through image and action alone, with only a call to action at the end translated into 15 languages. The result is a series that works identically in Tokyo, Toronto and Berlin without any production rework for each market.

Translating and subtitling for specific communities

For the Mayor of London and Doctors of the World’s Covid-19 information campaign, the brief was different, reaching specific migrant communities in London who needed accurate health information in their own language, urgently. We produced the animations in English and translated them into ten further languages: Bulgarian, Turkish, Bengali, Kurdish, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Spanish, Traditional Chinese and Vietnamese. Each version was reviewed for cultural as well as linguistic accuracy before distribution across social media.

Building a series in multiple languages from the ground up

For the NHS National Screening Programme, we have developed an ongoing series of animations explaining screening and testing available throughout a person’s lifetime, translated into 12 languages representing a range of communities in NHS settings across the UK. Focus groups were used at every stage to ensure the visual language and voiceover style worked across different cultural contexts, not just the words.

Drama across borders

For the Metro Charity SHIFT campaign, EU-funded sexual health films for a consortium of UK, Belgian and Dutch charities, we took a different approach again. Each of the six drama-based films was scripted, cast and shot to feel genuinely local, working with local crew and casting in each country rather than producing a British film and translating it.

If you have a brief that requires content to work across languages or cultures, we’d love to talk through the right approach for your project. Get in touch with the Nutmeg team.