Translation, Localisation and Transcreation: Which One You Are Actually Buying
Three words get used interchangeably in briefs and they describe three different jobs at three different prices. Buying the wrong one is the most common reason a multilingual project disappoints.
Translation
The meaning of the source, accurately in the target language. Correct for contracts, manuals, textbooks, research papers, certificates — anything where fidelity to the original is the point and deviation is a defect. Priced per word.
Localisation
Translation plus everything around it that has to change for the text to work in another market: dates, currency, units, address and phone formats, name order, sorting, text that grows or shrinks in layout, scripts that need different fonts or line heights, and cultural references that would not land. Software, websites, apps and marketing need this. Priced per project, because the work is not only in the words.
Transcreation
The idea is kept; the words are rewritten. A slogan, a campaign line, a brand story. The output is judged on whether it produces the same effect, not on whether it matches the source. Priced closer to copywriting than to translation, and it is the right choice far less often than agencies suggest.
What decides quality, before anyone translates
- A glossary. Agreed terms for your product, features and domain vocabulary, fixed in writing before the first page. Without one, the same term appears three ways in one document.
- A style guide. Formal or informal address, how numerals are written, whether English product names stay in Latin script, how measurements appear.
- Context for the translator. Screenshots, page layout, character limits. A string translated in a spreadsheet with no context is a guess.
- A second linguist. Translation, then independent revision. One person alone will not catch their own reading of an ambiguous sentence.
Indian languages specifically
Text length changes significantly between English and Indic scripts, which breaks layouts built for English. Line height and font choice matter more than in Latin scripts — many free fonts render conjuncts poorly in Tamil, Devanagari and Bengali. Plan the typography with the translation, not after it.
Subtitling is its own discipline
Subtitles are not a transcript. They are constrained by reading speed, line length and shot changes: characters per second, two lines maximum, no crossing a cut. A perfectly accurate translation timed badly is unreadable, which is why subtitling is priced per minute of video rather than per word.
Decide which of the three you need before asking for a quote. The brief that says "translate our website into eight languages" and the brief that says "localise our website for eight markets" describe projects with different scopes, timelines and prices.