Creative Localization Priced Per Market, Never Per Word

Language count is the wrong unit for this work. A claim that is legal in Germany can be unlawful in Sweden with the identical wording, and Danish and Norwegian copy that reads as interchangeable to a Swede carries two different regulators behind it: Forbrugerombudsmanden and Forbrukertilsynet, each with its own practice on health and price claims. So I price and schedule per market, because every market absorbs the same three costs — a claim read, a layout adjustment and a native reviewer who has worked in your category — and none of those scale with word count. The layout part is not cosmetic. Finnish runs roughly 25 to 30 percent longer than English and its compounds do not break where a designer expects, so a headline field drawn for English overflows or drops to a second line that collides with the product. Swedish compounds behave the same way at shorter length. German is worse in display and better in video. A fixed-width button that fit the English label will not fit Kjøp nå, Osta nyt and Jetzt kaufen at the same type size, and shrinking all three to match the longest is how a set of local assets ends up looking cheaper than the original. Why the unit is the market: Each market gets its own claim column. For health and wellness, that means checking the intended benefit statement against the authorised wording in the EU register under Regulation 1924/2006 in that language, not translating the English claim and hoping the meaning survives — the authorised wording is fixed per language and a faithful translation of it is frequently not it. For direct-to-consumer, price and comparison claims go against Marknadsföringslagen in Sweden and its equivalents in Denmark, Norway and Finland, where reference-price rules differ. For law firms, marketing sits under the national bar's rules, and success-rate language that a firm may use in one jurisdiction is unusable in another. What ships per market: A copy deck with three columns: the local line, a literal back-translation of it, and the source for any statement carrying legal weight, so your counsel can review without speaking the language. Adjusted layouts rather than swapped strings, with type and field sizes re-set where the language demands it. A font coverage check before anything is set, because å, ä, ö, ø, æ and the Finnish long vowels are still missing from display faces that pass a casual look. For video: subtitle files as SRT and burned-in versions for sound-off placements, plus voice-over direction and casting where the market needs a native voice rather than a subtitle. Markets I take and markets I refuse: Swedish, Norwegian bokmål, Danish, Finnish and English I handle directly with named reviewers I have worked with for years. German and Dutch run through two named reviewers with category experience, who you may speak to. Beyond that I decline. I have no way to judge whether a Japanese or Brazilian Portuguese line is doing what the brief says, and a localization vendor who cannot read the output is only a project manager charging a margin on somebody else's work. Excluded: Machine translation with human post-editing, at any price. Legal sign-off itself, which stays with your counsel or your local firm; I prepare the pack they review and I chase it. Website, product and support-content localization, which needs a different setup and a translation memory I am not going to build inside an ad engagement. New creative for a market that turns out to need a different idea rather than a different language — I will tell you when I see it, and it is a separate conversation. Not for you if: You want a per-word or per-language rate, or you need markets outside the set above.