Software Localization Services

What our software localization services cover

The service takes your product from one interface language to many without disrupting how your team ships. That includes application UI strings, mobile apps, web front ends, installers, error and log messages meant for users, onboarding flows, and the operator-facing text of embedded systems. Our software localization services are built around a simple constraint: developers should never copy strings into a spreadsheet, and translators should never work blind on a list of fragments with no idea which screen they belong to.

Both problems are solved with tooling and process. On the file side, we parse the native resource formats directly, so engineering effort on your end is close to zero. On the context side, every string reaches the translator with its key, its developer note, its character limit if one exists, and a screenshot of the screen where it appears. That last item changes outcomes more than any other single practice: "Save" translates differently as a button, a menu item, or a progress label, and only context tells you which one you are holding.

What this page does not cover: help centers, developer guides, and release notes follow a documentation pipeline instead, described on our software documentation translation page, and reference material for integrators is handled by our API documentation team. UI and docs share one termbase per client, so the button in the app and the button in the help article carry the same name in every language.

Resource file formats and ICU MessageFormat handling

We work in the formats your stack already produces. No conversion round-trips, no fragile find-and-replace, no reformatted files that fail your linter.

Format	Typical stack	What we watch for
.resx	.NET, WPF, WinForms	Escaped XML entities, comments preserved for context
.po / .pot	gettext, Python, PHP	Plural forms per language, fuzzy flags cleared correctly
.strings / .stringsdict	iOS, macOS	stringsdict plural rules, format specifier order
strings.xml	Android	Quantity strings, escaped apostrophes, string arrays
XLIFF 1.2 / 2.0	Exports from most platforms	Inline tags and segmentation kept round-trip safe
JSON / YAML i18n	React, Vue, Angular, Rails	Nested keys, interpolation syntax per library
.properties	Java	Unicode escapes, line continuation handling

ICU MessageFormat deserves its own mention because it is where localization projects quietly break. A message like {count, plural, one {# device} other {# devices}} has two branches in English but needs four in Russian and Polish, which use one, few, many, and other, while Japanese collapses to a single form. Nested select and plural structures multiply the branches. Our translators are trained on ICU syntax, our TMS validates the message structure on export, and we add the plural categories each target language requires instead of mechanically mirroring the English pair. Files come back syntactically valid, which your CI can confirm before merge.

Pseudo-localization: find the breakage before paying for it

Before translating anything, we recommend one pseudo-localization pass. We generate a fake locale in which every string is padded by roughly 40 percent, wrapped in markers, and injected with accented characters, so Settings becomes something like [Šéttîñgš~~~]. You build the app against that locale and click through it once.

The pass exposes three defect classes while they are still cheap. Strings that appear in English inside the pseudo build are hardcoded and never reached the resource files. Text that clips, overlaps, or pushes the layout apart marks the components that will fail under real expansion. And any corrupted characters reveal an encoding problem in the pipeline. Each finding costs one code fix at this stage. Found later, the same defect costs a fix plus retesting in every shipped language, which for a ten-language product means the pseudo pass typically pays for itself several times over before the first translated string exists.

German +35 percent, and other expansion realities

English is a compact interface language, and layouts designed against it hide assumptions that other languages break. German runs 30 to 35 percent longer on average, and short UI labels expand worse than prose: "Undo" becomes "Rückgängig machen". Finnish and Hungarian behave similarly. In the other direction, Japanese and Chinese are often shorter but taller, needing more line height, and their line-breaking rules differ from Latin scripts entirely.

When a limit genuinely cannot be met, we do not silently truncate. The translator proposes an approved abbreviation, and for regulated or safety-relevant interfaces we route those abbreviations to your engineers for sign-off. On one project, a teach pendant interface for a robotics manufacturer allowed 20 characters per line on the pendant display. Our German team delivered a reviewed abbreviation list alongside the translations, and the client's controls engineers validated it against the pendant simulator before release. That workflow, string limits in, abbreviation list out, is standard for HMI work, and it is one reason robotics and automation firms bring us their operator panels as well as their desktop software.

Continuous localization: your repo talks to our TMS

Most software teams have outgrown the release-then-translate model. Our default setup connects your repository to our translation management system through webhooks. When a commit touching resource files merges into your main branch, the changed and added keys flow into a translation job automatically. Translators clear the accumulated queue on an agreed cadence, and completed languages return to you as a pull request, formatted to pass your checks, ready for a normal code review.

The practical effects are worth spelling out. There is no string freeze, so release planning stops negotiating with translation deadlines. Small diffs replace big batches, so a typo fix in English becomes a ten-word job instead of a document. The same named translators hold your account, working from your termbase and translation memory, so the voice of the product stays stable from sprint to sprint. And because the TMS tracks every key, you can answer "is 14.2 fully localized in Japanese" with a dashboard instead of an email thread. Teams shipping to Japan in particular pair this setup with our Japanese technical translation specialists, since short release cycles leave no slack for re-briefing a new linguist every sprint.

Linguistic QA in the real build

Translated files that compile are not the finish line. The finish line is a reviewer looking at each language running in the product. We take a staging URL, a TestFlight build, an APK, or an HMI simulator, and walk scripted passes through the main flows in every target language. Reviewers check for truncation and overlap, wrong line breaks, placeholders rendering as raw tokens, plural messages tested with values of one, two, and zero, and strings whose translation was correct in isolation but wrong on the actual screen.

Findings are filed in your issue tracker, one defect per ticket, with the string key, a screenshot, the language, and a severity. Your developers fix layout issues; we fix linguistic ones through the normal pipeline, so corrections stay inside translation memory instead of dying in a hotfix. For clients without a spare environment, we can run QA against recorded walkthroughs, though live builds catch more. This stage follows the same discipline as the rest of our work: an ISO 17100-compliant process with revision by a second linguist before anything reaches QA, and independent review that no deadline is allowed to squeeze out.

How a new account gets set up, week by week

The first two weeks decide how smoothly the next two years run, so onboarding follows a fixed sequence. Week one is the audit: we parse your resource files, count keys and words per language, map interpolation syntax, and list structural risks such as concatenated sentences built from separate keys, which no translator can fix downstream. In parallel, we extract candidate terms from the UI corpus and draft the termbase, which your product team approves before translation starts. Week two sets up the plumbing: repository connection, branch and pull request conventions agreed with your engineers, pseudo-localization build if you opted in, and QA scripts drafted from your main user flows.

Then we run a pilot in one language rather than launching all targets at once. The pilot surfaces the account-specific decisions, tone for error messages, handling of trademarked feature names, abbreviation policy, while the cost of a wrong guess is one language, not eight. Once the pilot passes in-build QA, the remaining languages start with a style guide and a validated pipeline already in place.

App localization accounts usually extend the scope beyond the binary at this stage. Store listings, screenshot captions, in-app purchase names, and push notification templates live outside the resource files but face the same users, so we fold them into the same termbase and cadence. A listing that calls a feature one thing while the app calls it another is the kind of mismatch this setup exists to prevent.

Pricing and turnaround for sprint-based work

Software localization is priced per word for translation and revision, with translation memory discounts applied automatically to repeated keys and previously translated strings. Around that core, continuous accounts get terms tuned to how sprint work actually arrives: per-batch minimum fees are waived, and drops of 200 to 2,000 words per language return within 24 to 48 hours. Pseudo-localization setup, LQA passes in the build, and TMS-to-repo integration are quoted as separate line items, hourly or fixed, so you see what the engineering side costs on its own.

Two figures help with budgeting. First, UI corpora repeat heavily; across a typical account, memory matches reduce the effective per-word cost by 25 to 40 percent within the first year. Second, adding a language to an established pipeline costs far less than the first language did, because the integration, the termbase structure, and the QA scripts already exist. After fifteen years of doing this, including our ATA and GALA memberships and a client base served US-wide from Texas, our standing advice is unchanged: build the pipeline once, carefully, and languages become a scaling decision instead of a project.

Where UI localization connects to the rest of your content

Interface text never travels alone. The strings reference concepts that also appear in training courses, help articles, and spec sheets, and users notice when the names drift apart. For product training built in Storyline or Rise, our elearning translation services reuse the UI termbase so course screenshots and narration match the shipped interface. SaaS and enterprise vendors can see how we structure multi-product programs on our page for software and IT companies, and the rest of our service line, from DTP to terminology management, is listed on the services hub.

If you are unsure where your project sits, send us a resource file export and the list of target languages. We will come back within one business hour with an itemized quote, a proposed cadence, and any red flags we spot in the file structure, such as concatenated strings or missing plural forms, before they become translation defects.