Projects that did
what they were supposed to.
We document our work with enough detail to be useful. Project context, what we did, why, and what came out of it.
E-commerce localization and brand voice adaptation for 4 European markets
Bastura Commerce was entering four European markets simultaneously with a product line in the home goods category. Their English product descriptions had strong voice and personality -- something that had driven good conversion rates in the US. Translating word-for-word would lose that personality and read like a translated page rather than a brand speaking directly to German, French, Italian, and Spanish shoppers.
We assigned four translators -- one per target market -- each with consumer goods background and native-speaker status in the target language. Rather than translating from the English copy, each translator was briefed on the brand voice and rewrote the product descriptions from the same brief the English copy had been written from. The goal was equivalent conversion rate, not equivalent words.
Conversion rates in all four markets exceeded the English baseline within 90 days. Germany came in 3x the initial forecast. The client now uses the same adapted process for every new product launch.
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Full script and UI localization for a narrative mobile RPG
Copper Pixel Games had a narrative-driven mobile RPG with six distinct character voices, dialogue trees, menu strings, tutorial copy, and achievement text -- over 40,000 words that needed to feel native to Japanese players, not localized. The biggest risk was the character voices collapsing into a generic formal register that Japanese players associate with bad translation.
We assigned a game localization specialist with experience in narrative RPG projects and Japanese mobile gaming conventions. Character voice guides were written before translation started, defining register, sentence-final particles, vocabulary range, and personality markers for each of the six characters. UI strings were localized separately with attention to character limits and screen density.
Japanese launch review scores came in equivalent to English launch scores -- the game did not suffer the typical localization-quality penalty in reviews. Players in Japan commented on the natural character voices in forum discussions.
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