Notes for owners · Branding and communication
How to adapt a campaign into Indian languages
Hand the writer your claim and your seconds, not your English sentence. Then freeze one spelling of your name per script and approve a printed proof.
The GullySales team · Updated 21 Sept 2026 · 9 min read
The instruction that fixes most of this is one sentence long: hand the writer your claim, your offer and the space or the seconds you have bought, and never hand them the English line. A translated line arrives carrying the shape of the English sentence, which is exactly what makes regional advertising sound like it was written somewhere else and posted in. Everything below is the rest of the method, and the parts of it that are specific to each language.
Write the home language first
For a business in Karnataka, the habit of writing in English and adapting into Kannada afterwards is backwards. The English sentence is finished, so the Kannada writer is asked to match its rhythm rather than build one, and the result is correct Kannada that nobody would say.
Turn the order round on the campaigns where Kannada carries the weight. Write the Kannada line first, from the claim, and let English be the version that adapts. It costs nothing, and the difference is audible the first time somebody reads it out.
Then treat Kannada as a market rather than a language. What is said in Bengaluru and Mysuru is not what is said in Dharwad, Ballari or Kalaburagi, and a north Karnataka listener knows within a sentence whether the voice on the radio is from their side of the state. For a statewide buy, standard Kannada. For a district campaign, a voice from that district.
Freeze one spelling of your name, per script
Three vendors will produce three spellings of your business name in Kannada if you let them: the board painter, the newspaper's DTP operator and the agency that made the artwork. None of them is wrong. They are just different, and the differences show up on your name board, your panel and your Google listing at the same time.
Settle it once. One Kannada spelling, one pronunciation note for voice artists, kept in the same file as your logo. Do it again for each script you will use, since a name written in Tamil can be read two ways, and Tamil has one letter where English has both a P and a B.
This matters beyond tidiness. Search engines and AI assistants confirm a business by matching its name and address across the places it appears, and three spellings look like three businesses. The signage rules in Karnataka give Kannada a required share of a name board, and your sign maker and the local body will tell you what the current requirement is, so confirm it before fabrication rather than after.
Budget the length in time and in space, not in characters
A character count tells you nothing across scripts. Two measurements do.
For anything spoken, record the draft and time it. A ten-second radio spot, a fifteen-second reel, a presenter's line in a film. Languages carry the same meaning in different numbers of syllables, so a translated script that was written to the English clock runs over, and the cut gets made at the studio by whoever is standing there.
For anything printed, set it into the actual layout at actual size. Kannada builds sub-consonants underneath the line, so a Kannada headline grows downward and needs more line height and a larger point size to be read from the same distance as the English one. Tamil grows sideways instead. A layout drawn around an English headline will not hold either of them without being redrawn.
What changes, language by language
| Language | The thing that catches people out |
|---|---|
| Kannada | Stacked letters make the line deeper, so type size and leading both go up. District speech differs enough to change the voice artist, and the name board carries a Kannada requirement set by the state |
| Hindi | Spoken Hindi absorbs English words easily, so a script can stay close to the original. A newspaper's written register does not, and the same line reads badly in print |
| Tamil | The written and spoken forms are separate registers, so print and radio need two different lines. The script cannot tell a B from a P in your name |
| Telugu | Polite forms and longer verb endings stretch a spoken script, and Telangana and coastal speech differ enough to make the voice a market decision |
| Malayalam | Two spelling conventions are in circulation, so the same word can be set two ways and readers notice. Newspaper readership is high, so print carries more weight than it does elsewhere |
| Marathi | The same script as Hindi hides the fact that the language is different. A third, neuter gender means a templated line breaks when the product changes |
Each has a page of its own, because each is a different set of decisions rather than a different dictionary: Kannada, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Malayalam and Marathi. Getting one campaign to work across a hoarding, a radio spot and a feed is a separate job, and it is covered in how to adapt one campaign across media.
The stage where it dies is artwork, not writing
Good copy is ruined at the desk more often than it is written badly. The text is pasted into design software by somebody who cannot read the script, a font without the right letters substitutes something close, conjunct letters break apart, and a last-minute edit is typed by an operator working from a phone photograph at eleven at night.
Some print workshops still run older non-Unicode fonts, so text that looked right when it left your office arrives as nonsense on the proof. The words also have to survive whatever comes next, since a file that is fine on screen can still break when it is output for a large-format printer.
So the rule is the same everywhere. No approval from a Word file, a WhatsApp image or a screen. A printed proof at final size, or an exported file viewed at full size, read out loud by somebody who reads that script. Every correction after that goes back through the same check, because the correction is where the breakage usually happens.
What stays identical across every version
The artwork barely changes. What drifts is the facts, because six versions mean six writers working from six emails, and nobody is reading all six.
So keep one offer document. The conditions and the rupee figure are written once there and quoted by every version, in every language, and no writer is allowed to improve them. A ten per cent discount that becomes "the lowest price in the city" in one language is now a claim you cannot stand behind in that language, in front of the only people who can read it.
The phone number stays in the figures people dial. The claim may be said in different words and may not become a different promise.
Regulated wording is the strictest case. A hospital's disclaimer or a finance scheme's condition has to be approved in each language by whoever approves it in English, and the approved string is then untouchable by writers and designers alike. Budget time for that approval, because it is the step that holds up printing.
For example, a hospital running a health camp across Karnataka might use one offer document, one set of photographs and one number, with the Kannada line written first, a Tamil version for the Hosur border belt, and the disclaimer approved separately in each language. One campaign, three files, one set of facts.
What to do next
Take the last regional creative you approved and ask two questions. Who read it aloud before it was printed, and were they the kind of person you sell to. If the answer is nobody and no, that is the process gap, and it costs less to fix than the media did.
GullySales coordinates this work rather than claiming to do it all in house, whether it ends up on regional television or on a shop board. The writing, the voice and the proof reading are done by people who work in those languages, and we hold the claim, the brief, the approvals and the deadlines so the same offer arrives intact in each one. Bring your English campaign and whatever regional versions exist to the free audit, and we will go through them line by line.