Localization Review

Localization review

Translation is the easy half. The job is to make the copy land the way the original landed — same intent, same register, same relationship between writer and reader — and to say clearly where that is not possible instead of shipping a sentence that is correct and wrong.

The one rule that governs everything

Translate the intent, then flag where the intent does not travel. A sentence can be word-perfect and still fail: the wrong formality register, an idiom that reads as nonsense, a joke with no equivalent, a politeness level that reads as contempt. Those are not translation errors and they will not show up in review by a bilingual colleague skimming for accuracy. Name them explicitly, every time, with what you did instead.

Procedure

1. Establish register before translating a word. Who is speaking to whom, and in what relationship? Support reply, marketing headline, error message, and legal notice all sit at different registers, and the mapping differs per locale — see references/register-map.md. Getting this wrong is the single most common cause of "the translation is fine but our users think we are rude".
2. Read the whole piece first. Strings translated one at a time lose the thread and produce inconsistent terms in adjacent sentences.
3. Check the glossary before inventing a term. Product nouns, feature names, and UI labels must be stable across every string, release, and locale. A feature renamed silently between two releases costs support tickets in that locale forever.
4. Translate for the reader, not the source syntax. Sentence structure, length, and punctuation should be native. A German sentence that mirrors English clause order is legible and obviously foreign.
5. Mark every non-travelling item with what you did: [register-changed], [idiom-replaced], [joke-replaced], [joke-dropped], [culturally-unsafe], [needs-native-review]. The tag is for the human deciding whether to ship it.
6. Check the mechanics that break layouts and meaning: text expansion (German and Finnish commonly run 20-35% longer than English, Chinese and Korean shorter), date and number formats, decimal separators, currency placement, address and name-field assumptions, pluralization rules beyond one/many, gendered agreement with variables, right-to-left mirroring, and sorting order.
7. Never ship a joke untested. If it cannot be tested in the target language, replace it with a different, worse joke that works, or cut it and say you cut it. A joke that fails is worse than no joke, because it reads as incompetence rather than as absence.
8. Update the glossary with anything new you settled, and say what you added.

What to flag, with examples of the class

• Formality mismatch. Informal second person in a support email is warm in one locale and insulting in another. This is the top-severity flag; it changes the relationship, not the wording.
• Idioms and metaphors. "Circle back", "low-hanging fruit", "ballpark". Replace with the local equivalent or plain language — never translate literally, which produces surreal sentences that native readers screenshot.
• Humour, wordplay, rhyme, alliteration. Assume none of it travels; earn it back.
• Culturally loaded specifics. Holidays, sports, food, school systems, legal and medical framings, gestures, colours and number superstitions.
• Names and honorifics. Given/family order, honorific requirements, and the fact that a first-name-only greeting is friendly in some locales and presumptuous in others.
• Legal and regulated copy. Consumer-rights wording, cancellation windows, warranty and privacy language are jurisdiction-specific. Flag for legal review rather than translating a claim that becomes false in the target market.

Hard rules

• Never invent a fluency you do not have. If a locale is outside what you can review reliably, translate, tag [needs-native-review], and say so in the handoff.
• Never soften a warning, error, or safety message to sound nicer. Politeness registers apply to relationship copy, not to "this will delete your data".
• Never translate a term already fixed in the glossary, even when a better word exists. Propose the change as a glossary update instead, once, with the migration cost stated — every rename invalidates docs, support macros, and user habit.
• Never localize a legal claim, medical statement, or regulatory disclosure on your own.
• Do not machine-translate and present it as reviewed. Say which parts had a real pass.
• Keep placeholders, variables, escapes and markup byte-identical. A translated {count} or a smart-quoted apostrophe inside code is a runtime bug, and it is the single most common way a localization pass breaks a build.

Worked example

Source string, a support reply template, English:

Hey! Just wanted to check in — did you get a chance to look at that invoice?
Let me know if anything's unclear and I'll sort it out. Thanks!

German pass:

Sehr geehrte Frau Weber,

haben Sie die Rechnung bereits erhalten? Bei Fragen melden Sie sich gern, ich
kläre das für Sie.

Mit freundlichen Grüßen

Flags returned with it:

[register-changed] SEVERITY HIGH — source uses informal 'you' and a first-name-free
  greeting. In a German billing context that reads as presumptuous, not friendly.
  Switched to Sie + salutation. This is the flag that would have caused the complaint;
  the words were never the problem.
[idiom-replaced] "check in" and "sort it out" have no direct equivalent that keeps the
  casual-but-professional tone. Replaced with plain statements. Warmth now comes from
  "gern", which is where German carries it.
[culturally-unsafe] dropped the exclamation mark and "Thanks!" — enthusiasm punctuation
  in German business correspondence reads as sales pressure.
[glossary] "invoice" -> "Rechnung" (confirmed, already fixed; NOT "Faktura", which is
  Austrian-leaning and inconsistent with our existing 40 strings).
[expansion] German salutation + closing add 2 lines; check the email template's
  fixed-height preview pane.
[needs-native-review] no — reviewed.

Note what the flag list is for: a reviewer who reads only the two texts sees a longer, more formal German email and may "fix" it back toward the source. The flags say which differences are deliberate and which one was load-bearing.

Handoff

Return: the translated copy, the flag list with severities, glossary additions or conflicts, mechanical issues (expansion, formats, placeholders), and an explicit statement of which locales had a real review versus which need a native pass. If one string was asked about, return the string, the flags, and nothing else.

See references/register-map.md for per-locale formality and the copy types that must never share a register.