If you sell across borders, you eventually hit a customer who loves the product and cannot easily say so in your language. They answer support tickets in short, careful sentences. On a call they understand everything and speak haltingly. They are not less satisfied than your domestic customers — often they are more so, because a product that works across a language barrier has earned it — but the standard testimonial ask quietly excludes them. "Could you write a few sentences about your experience?" is a reasonable request to a native speaker and an intimidating homework assignment to someone composing in their second or third language. So you never ask, and a whole tier of credible, geographically diverse proof goes uncollected. The fix is not to lower your standards. It is to change how you collect, so the language gap stops being the customer's problem to solve.
Why these testimonials are worth the extra effort
A testimonial from a customer in another market does something a domestic one cannot: it proves the product travels. A prospect in Germany or Brazil or Japan reading a wall of quotes from customers in your home country wonders, quietly, whether any of it applies to them. One quote from someone in their region, or even just someone plainly operating in a different language environment, answers that doubt directly. Geographic and linguistic diversity in your proof is not decoration — it is evidence of reach. So the goal is worth the friction, and the friction is entirely solvable.
Never ask them to write in your language
This is the whole game. The single thing that kills a non-native testimonial is asking the customer to produce polished prose in a language they do not write comfortably. They will either decline, or send something so hedged and simplified that it reads as lukewarm even though they are thrilled. Take the writing off their plate the same way you would for the customer who hates writing — the aversion here is not to effort, it is to exposure in a second language, and the remedy is identical: you write, they approve.
There are two clean ways to do it.
Let them speak, not write. Most people are far more fluent speaking their second language than composing it. Ask on a call — "What would you tell another team considering us?" — and capture the answer. Then you shape their spoken words into a clean sentence and send it back for approval. A halting spoken answer often contains a better, truer quote than anything they would have written, because speaking bypasses the self-editing that makes second-language writing stiff.
Let them write in their own language. For a customer who would rather write than speak, invite them to do it in their native language. "Feel free to write it in [their language] — we'll handle the rest." This is a gift: they get to be precise and natural, and you take on the translation. It almost always produces a warmer, more specific quote than forcing them through yours.
Handle the translation honestly
If the customer writes or speaks in their own language, you now have a translation decision, and the credibility of the quote depends on getting it right. Two rules keep you honest.
First, translate for meaning, not for polish. Do not inflate a modest, precise statement into marketing English — a customer who said the plain equivalent of "it saved us time every week" should not be quoted saying "ProofShow revolutionized our operations." Over-translation is a form of fabrication, and it reads as one.
Second, confirm the translation with the customer before you publish. Send them both versions — their original and your translation — and ask, "Did I capture what you meant?" This does two jobs: it protects you from a subtle mistranslation, and it gives the customer control over how they are represented in a language they cannot fully audit. That confirmation step is what separates a respectful translation from a liberty taken with someone's words.
Decide how to display it — and say what you did
Once you have an approved quote, you have a display choice, and the honest options are covered well in the guidance on translating a testimonial written in another language. The short version: showing the translated quote is fine, and for extra credibility you can show the original alongside it, which signals to every reader that you did not invent the words. What you should never do is present a translation as if the customer wrote it in your language natively while hiding that it was translated — the honesty of the provenance is part of what makes the quote trustworthy.
Keep the attribution real
A non-native testimonial gains, not loses, from specific attribution. A name, a role, and a company in another country is exactly the geographic proof a foreign prospect is looking for. Where the customer is comfortable, attribute fully. Where they are not, role-and-region — "Operations Lead, logistics company, São Paulo" — still delivers the reach signal. The one thing to avoid is stripping the international context to make the quote blend in with your domestic ones; that context is the whole reason the quote is valuable.
The through-line is simple: a customer who does not speak your language is not a customer without an opinion — they are a customer whose opinion you have been asking for in the wrong medium. Let them speak instead of write, or write in their own words instead of yours, translate for meaning and confirm it, and label the provenance honestly. Do that and you collect the one kind of proof your domestic testimonials can never provide — evidence, in a prospect's own region, that the product works there too.