Should one be asked about Morocco and nation branding, their mind will speak the slogan 'Kingdom of Light’. While such hooks trigger global attention, they remain superficial.
That is not to say that our nation has made no progress in this regard. It ranks 50th internationally on Brand Finance’s World Soft Power Index (as of 2026), leading the Maghreb and positioning itself 3rd in the African stage.
The country has been demonstrating a significant improvement in the index, as it moved from the 58th position in 2020 to the 50th worldwide in 2026. This reflects the success of the latest Moroccan policies and initiatives.
These are mainly in business and trade, governance, international relations, culture and heritage, media and communication, education and science, people and values, and sustainable future, which are the eight specific pillars of World Soft Power Index.
Morocco, as an international brand, is gaining traction but has yet to be close to the finish line. Every nation has a unique asset that it uses to be in the international limelight. Our kingdom is a nation whose patrimony is steeped in the annals of history. This constitutes the jewel in the crown of Morocco's international brand.
Accordingly, domestic patrimony should be transmitted in a cross-cultural way to people from different locales, establishing a terminological legacy (terminological sovereignty). The latter functions as a perpetual copyright transcription for culture-specific elements.
Those might be lost in oversimplification or hidden in ambiguity. This invokes the role of creating balanced translation strategies tailored for the Moroccan context.
For example, if elements like 'caftan' or ‘zellige’ were reflected in English terms internationally, this would have reduced their uniqueness as solely Moroccan items. Yet, establishing them as transliterated terms needed the insertion of extra information for clarification and involved numerous other procedures.
Can we control how our cultural items are reflected internationally?
A part of the reality is that cultural terms can be promoted by the respective nation itself or narrated about it by others. As a nation, you cannot always hold the purse strings. Nonetheless, there are efficacious means through which a nation can take the reins of this process.
In this regard, museums are one of the most prominent institutions that may direct cultural terms’ coinage. This is attributed to their role in education and how they bring together scholarly authorities who can significantly impact cross-cultural terms transfer, such as historians, cultural studies scholars, patrimony experts, and UNESCO officials, etc.
“Museums are not just about the past but are contemporary cultural experiences that reveal to us something about who we want to be”, said Neil MacGregor (Former Director of the British Museum) to BBC Radio 4.
This underscores how pivotal museums are in shaping international vision and, accordingly, promoting a nation’s cultural representations.
Aware of that importance, on January 15th, Morocco concluded a partnership agreement with Germany to forge strategic museum collaboration.
This includes multilingualism in such institutions, reinforcing cultural communication through contextualising exhibited elements.
The initiative bespeaks a turn to fostering Morocco as an upcoming soft power actor in Africa and the MENA regions.
Why translation?
With the emergence of new technologies and industries, translation has shifted from a practice that concerns individuals to a strategic pillar for nation branding, implying that, in many cases, people do not need translation for their personal sake.
Since then, the light in translation studies has been shed on translation as a renarration. This foretells that translating a text means providing a respective second narration, matching it with the properties of its new intended milieu.
The crux of the matter here is who is the translator, or rather, the second narrator? In this vein, translation’s role appears fathomable, as the nation or culture should take the helm of producing quality translations that efficaciously promote its values.
When this is not done correctly, a nation risks having narrations made about it by others, putting its reputation and brand at risk. This seems even more crucial when the translation is to English, as a lingua franca.
Illustrating this role, Morocco relied heavily on adequate translation and clarification of cultural facts about various cultural specificities to get intercultural recognition.
Such was the case when the Kingdom had Caftan and Malhun recognised as a part of the Moroccan culture, submitting their technical files to UNESCO.
Terminological translation in Morocco had also involved translating (localising) cultural slogans into English, in order to brand the nation and promote its culture internationally.
This was primarily done through creating the first campaigns in English (Kingdom of Light, Visit Morocco, Morocco Now) targeted at non-French-speaking visitors in the US and Asian markets. The result was a record-breaking number of visitors: 18m visitors in 2025.
Tellingly, the fruits of such démarches are to be reaped in the foreseeable future, with a need to focus on scholarly works, namely, translation to English as a practice that furthers international cultural branding marketing.