Software Localization Editing and Proofreading Services

Localisation multiplies every weakness in your source text by the number of languages you ship. An ambiguous string is one question from one translator in one language and twelve questions across twelve; a sentence assembled from fragments is a grammatical impossibility in half of them; a phrase that grows by thirty per cent in German breaks a button that fitted perfectly in English. Most localisation problems are not translation problems at all — they are source text problems, discovered late, in a language nobody on the team can read.

We edit what localisation teams and vendors produce — source strings prepared for translation, terminology glossaries and translation style guides, context notes and screenshots for translator reference, localisation kits and handover packages, query logs and answers to translator questions, internationalisation guidelines for developers, market and locale-specific content adaptations, review and linguistic quality assurance criteria, vendor briefs and translation scope documents, machine translation post-editing guidelines, and the English source content itself before it enters the pipeline. Our editors work on the source side, where a single fix propagates to every target language, and we check for the constructions that reliably break in translation.

The glossary and style guide sent to translators is the highest-leverage document in the whole pipeline, because it is the one artefact that shapes every word delivered by every linguist across every language and every future release. Most are a spreadsheet of terms with an approved translation and nothing else, which leaves the translator to guess at exactly the points where guessing is costly. We rewrite them so each entry carries the part of speech, a definition, a usage example, and — critically — the terms that must not be used and why, since near-synonyms are where consistency actually breaks. We add the decisions a style guide must make and usually does not: how to handle product names and untranslatable terms, which form of address to use, how to treat units, dates and currency, and what to do with humour or idiom in the source. Then we make sure the source English itself complies with its own glossary, which is frequently where the audit finds its first surprise.

Everything you send is treated confidentially, including unreleased product strings, glossaries and vendor agreements. Whether you are preparing a product for its first international release, cleaning up a source corpus before a large translation spend, or writing guidance for a vendor network, we can make the source text and the reference material do the work they should.