Translation and localisation

What translation and localisation is

Translation is putting the words of a page into another language. Localisation is the larger job of making the page work for people who live somewhere else: their units, dates, currency, law, and what they find convincing. This service is both: a human translator who lives in that market, and a second person there who checks the result.

It is not machine output with a tidy-up pass. Machine translation is good enough to tell you what a supplier's email says and nowhere near good enough to sell with: it produces fluent sentences that are subtly not what a customer there would say, and you cannot see the problem from here. It is also not a second website: the site has to be built to hold another language, which is a development job.

When you need one

The common Canadian case is French. A business selling nationally, or bidding for work in Quebec, needs material in French that reads as though it was written in French, and in some situations is obliged to have it. The second is export: a product sold into the United States or a European market, where the differences are smaller than they look. The third is inbound: staff or customers who do not read your first language comfortably, and safety material nobody may misread.

Here is the honest caution, and it costs me work. If the site does not do its job in the language it is already in — if the home page does not say plainly what you sell — translating it does not buy a second market. It buys two sites that do not work and twice the maintenance. Fix the first, through a rewrite or a content audit, then translate. I say this on the first call whenever it applies.

What actually changes

Word for word is the failure mode, not the standard. A translator working properly rewrites the lines that would not work carried across literally, and says which and why.

• Idiom and humour. A turn of phrase that is unremarkable in one language is baffling, or quietly rude, in another. It is replaced by something that does the same work.
• Taglines and anything built on a pun. A line that turns on a double meaning does not survive translation. It is written again in the target language from the idea underneath, which is nearer copywriting than translation and is priced that way.
• Measurements, dates and numbers. Metric or imperial, and which the trade there really uses, which is not always the official one. Day-month or month-day, the decimal marker, and the shape of a postal code and an address field.
• Currency and the words around a sale. Which currency is shown, whether tax is in the displayed price, and the local terms for shipping, duty and returns. Getting this wrong reads as carelessness at the moment somebody was deciding to buy.
• Legal and regulatory wording. Guarantees, warranties, privacy notices, terms of sale and any claim of a qualification. These are rewritten to what the market requires, or flagged for your lawyer. Never translated hopefully.

What you get

The translated pages. In whatever format your site or typesetter needs, with headings, buttons, form labels, image descriptions and page titles done as well as the body. The half-translated site, paragraphs in one language and buttons in another, is the commonest failure.

A bilingual glossary of your terms. Product names, job titles, service names and the vocabulary of your trade, fixed in both languages, with the ones that stay in the original marked as such. Everything translated later works from it, so the second batch agrees with the first.

A list of what was adapted rather than translated. Every line the translator rewrote, the original beside it, and one sentence on why. It is what stops a bilingual member of staff finding a line that is not a literal match and reporting it as an error.

The reviewer's sign-off. A second person in the target market reads the finished pages as a customer would and marks anything that reads as foreign. Nobody catches this in their own work.

A worked example

An illustration, not a client. An Ontario company making ventilation equipment for commercial kitchens wants fourteen pages in French for the Quebec market: six product pages, three service pages, the about and contact pages, and three installation guides.

The English pages are signed off and frozen first, because translating a moving target means paying for the same sentence twice. A glossary is agreed before a word is translated: the equipment names, the parts, the trade terms and the two product names that stay in English. A translator in Quebec works through the fourteen pages over three weeks. Four things are rewritten rather than translated: the tagline, which turned on an English double meaning and is replaced by a line the owner approves; two headings built on a figure of speech; and the guarantee, reworded to the form used in the province and checked by the company's lawyer. A reviewer in Montreal marks eleven small things, nine of which are changed. The installation guides get an extra technical check, because a misread instruction in a commercial kitchen is not a marketing problem.

How it runs

1. A half-hour call. Which market, which pages, and whether the first-language versions work. No charge.
2. A fixed price in writing. My fee, the translator's and the reviewer's, stated separately, with any line needing a rewrite priced on its own.
3. Source freeze and glossary. The pages are signed off and locked, and your terms fixed in both languages, before translation starts. Changes after that are quoted as changes.
4. Translation. Roughly a week per five to eight pages, longer for technical or regulated material.
5. In-market review. Three to five working days, the notes shown to you rather than silently applied.
6. Delivery. Pages, glossary, adaptation list and sign-off, in a folder you own.

What it costs

Quoted in CAD after the half-hour call, because the range is wide: fourteen plain pages and a regulated technical manual are not the same job. The translator's rate, the reviewer's rate and my fee are separate lines, and any line rewritten rather than translated is priced as writing. Rates are passed through with no mark-up, and the figure is fixed in writing before anything begins. The pricing page shows the four ways of working.

What happens next

Translated pages have to go into a site that can hold them, with the right language settings and a visible way to switch, which is the specification and build if that has not been done. A final read in both languages before they go live is worth the small fee. And if the market proves worth serving properly, the next question is whether it needs material written for it rather than translated into it, which means a writer who lives there, briefed like any other specialist under contractor coordination. This translation is finished when it is signed off.