Localization Agencies Editing and Proofreading Services

Marketing does not translate. A campaign line built on a pun, a cultural reference, a rhythm or an idiom has no equivalent in the target language, and a faithful translation of it produces something accurate and dead. The agencies that handle this well know they are being asked for a different thing — the same effect, produced by different means — and the document that determines whether they get it is the brief, which usually arrives as a source file and a deadline.

We edit what localisation agencies and their clients produce — transcreation briefs and campaign adaptation documentation, source copy prepared for adaptation, creative rationale and back-translation explanations for clients, market and cultural review documentation, in-market reviewer guidance and feedback categorisation, terminology and brand glossaries for each market, tone of voice adaptation guidance, legal and regulatory variation notes by market, packaging and claims adaptation documentation, name and tagline testing documentation, subtitling and voiceover adaptation briefs, and client-facing explanations of why a line cannot be translated. Our editors work on the English source and the brief that travels with it.

The transcreation brief is the document that decides whether the adaptation works, and it fails when it supplies the words instead of the intention. A writer in another market given the English line and asked to translate it will translate it; given what the line is doing — the audience, the feeling, the thing being contrasted, why the pun exists — they can build something that does the same work in a language where the pun does not. We write these so the brief states the strategic intent above the line, so the creative device is named and marked as replaceable, so the elements that are genuinely fixed are separated from those that are not — the product claim, the legal wording, the brand name — since transcreators frequently preserve the wrong things out of caution; so the emotional register is described rather than asserted; and so the back-translation is explained to the client in advance, because a client reading a literal back-translation of good transcreation always thinks it has gone wrong. That last document prevents more rejected work than anything else in the process.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including campaigns before launch and client material. We are editors rather than translators or cultural consultants, and we offer no view on target-language copy, cultural appropriateness or market suitability. What we can do is make the source and the brief clear enough to be adapted well.