Buy Localisation from Verified Native Speakers

A Practical Guide to Buying Localisation

Localisation is the point where a product stops being an English-language thing that other people can also use and becomes something that feels native in another market. It is also the discipline where the difference between a good supplier and a cheap one shows up months later, in support tickets rather than in the delivered file — which is why how you brief it matters more than almost any other content purchase.

Locales, Not Languages

Start by writing your targets as locales. Portuguese is not a target; pt-BR and pt-PT are, and they differ in vocabulary, grammar and register enough that a Brazilian audience notices European Portuguese immediately. The same applies to Spanish across Spain and Latin America, to simplified and traditional Chinese, and to English across the UK, the US and Australia. Naming the locale up front is free. Discovering the mismatch after launch is not.

Send the File, Not the Sentences

The most reliable predictor of a painful localisation project is a spreadsheet. Exporting strings to a sheet strips the keys, the developer comments and often the placeholders, and re-importing by hand introduces errors nobody sees until runtime. Give the linguist your real resource file — JSON, XLIFF, PO, strings, XML — and ask them directly which formats they work in. Add screenshots or a staging URL: a string reading “Open” is a verb on a button and an adjective on a status badge, and no linguist can tell which without seeing it.

Placeholders, Plurals and Variables

Interpolated values are where localisation quietly breaks. A placeholder must survive intact, and word order around it changes between languages, so the linguist needs to be free to move it. Plural rules are worse: English has two forms, several Slavic languages have three or four, and a system that only offers singular and plural will produce wrong output no matter how good the translation is. If your framework supports proper plural categories, say so; if it does not, ask the linguist to flag every string where that limitation forces an awkward rendering.

Text Expansion, Layout and Right-to-Left

Translated text rarely occupies the same space. German and Finnish commonly run longer than English, some Asian scripts run shorter horizontally but need more line height, and right-to-left languages such as Arabic and Hebrew require the whole layout to mirror rather than merely the text to flip. Supply character limits with constrained strings, and test the longest locale rather than the first one. Note that Arabic and Hebrew are messaging languages on Zinn Hub rather than site browse languages — but your own product can of course ship in any locale you choose.

Glossaries and Style Guides Compound

The single highest-return small purchase in localisation is a glossary agreed before anyone translates a word. It lists your product names, feature names and technical terms, states which are never translated, and fixes the target-language rendering of the rest. Add a short style guide covering register, form of address and how you handle humour and idiom. Two competent linguists working six months apart will otherwise make different reasonable decisions, and your interface will slowly stop sounding like one product.

Review, LQA and the Order to Buy Them In

Translation, independent review and in-context LQA are three separate purchases and they catch three different classes of problem. Review is another native linguist checking accuracy and tone against the source. LQA happens against a real build and catches everything the file could never show — truncation, the wrong plural, a string reused in two contexts where only one rendering works. For interface and marketing content, buy all three. For low-stakes internal text, translation alone is a reasonable economy.

Media: Subtitles, Captions and Voice

Subtitling is editing as much as translating. Reading-speed limits, line lengths and shot changes all constrain what can appear, so a subtitle that reproduces every spoken word is usually a bad subtitle. Decide whether you need translated subtitles, same-language captions for accessibility, or both. For voice-over, agree pronunciation of product and brand names before the session, supply the video so delivery can be timed, and say whether you want the raw takes as well as the mix. Get a clean source transcript first from the transcription Micro Zinns — translating a rough auto-transcript propagates every error into every language.

Getting Started on Zinn Hub

Work in the order that protects your release. Agree the glossary, trial a linguist on a hundred strings as a fixed-price Micro Zinn at $5 to $20, commission the full file, buy an independent review from a different Zinner, then run LQA against a build. Compare quotes in USD with no buyer-side platform fee, and post a project free if you would rather have linguists quote against your real file. First-time buyers get their first order free, with the full amount returned on completion. For documents that need attestation see the legal and certified translation Micro Zinns, and for recorded audio pair your linguist with the voice-over marketplace.