Creative Localization With a Native Veto in Every Market

Localisation fails in the places a translation review does not look. The subtitle is correct and overflows the safe area by two lines in German. The voice is fluent and reads to a Warsaw audience as somebody who left twenty years ago. The presenter speaks Ukrainian while the product interface behind them is still in English, which is the fastest available way to tell a market that this ad was made for somewhere else. This engagement treats the master as the thing that has to change first and the languages as the part that follows. The localisation master: Every text element lives in Essential Graphics as replaceable data with a defined character ceiling, exported as .mogrt. Layouts are designed at German length first, since expansion over English runs to about a third and every lower third that is going to break breaks there before it breaks anywhere else. Arabic and Hebrew get a mirrored layout rather than a right-aligned one: eye-line, logo and motion direction swap sides with the text. Font stacks are checked for glyph coverage before casting, which is the moment a brand typeface with no Cyrillic set stops being a discovery in week six and becomes a decision in week one. Voice: Native talent, cast from three reads against picture, recorded in market. Synthetic dubbing is used only where a client accepts it for a low-stakes cut, and never on a line carrying a claim, a price or a legal disclosure. Lip-sync replacement is offered on hero material and nowhere below it, because under that threshold it costs more than it returns. Languages run directly: English and Ukrainian in-house. Polish, German, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Japanese and Arabic through standing teams that have worked on this practice's material before. Anything outside that list is quoted only once a reviewer has been found and agreed, not on the assumption that one will turn up. On-screen and in-world content: Product interface is re-captured per locale rather than subtitled over, which for education clients means a working build in that language before the shoot date. Currency, date order, decimal separators and units are set per market. For property material that means square metres against square feet and the local convention for numbering floors, since a film calling the first floor the second is describing a different apartment to half its audience. Review and sign-off: One named native reviewer per language, holding authority to reject and a deadline. No name, no language: the market is dropped from the order rather than shipped on the strength of a vendor's internal QA. The reviewer sees picture, never a spreadsheet, because a line that is correct in a cell is a different line over a face at 24 frames a second. Not included: Website, application and documentation string localisation, which belongs with a localisation vendor and their translation memory. Certified or legal translation. Subtitle files ordered as a standalone commodity. App store listing and metadata localisation, which is scoped with your ASO lead rather than here. Machine dubbing presented as native voice, under any budget or deadline. Who should not book this: Anyone who needs forty languages against a fixed date with no reviewer in most of them. A dubbing vendor with a per-minute rate will fill that order, and the result will look exactly like what it is. Also anyone whose original is not yet approved. Localisation multiplies whatever is in the master, including the parts nobody has signed off, and it multiplies the cost of changing them.