Translation gets treated as one line in a launch budget, and it really covers unrelated work. Part of it is compliance: certain information has to exist in a certain language because a member state says so, and a shipment or a listing can be stopped over it. The rest is commercial: a product sheet that reads slightly wrong tells a European buyer that the seller is far away and that after-sales will be an ordeal. Mixing them leads to the common outcome — a beautifully localised marketing page above a manual nobody in that country can legally rely on.
What has to be in the local language because a text says so
The principle is stable even though the detail is not. Safety information, instructions for use, labelling and the pre-contractual information owed to a consumer must be in the language or languages required by the member state where the product is made available. The requirement comes from product legislation and from consumer legislation at the same time, and each member state sets its own language rule: some accept a widely understood language for part of the technical documentation, others require their own language for everything a user reads, and a few have more than one official language to satisfy. That is a point to check country by country rather than to assume — and convenient English is not enough everywhere, whatever your distributor tells you.
- Warnings and safety instructions. Everything that tells a user what not to do, what to wear, how to dispose of it and what happens if it is misused. This is the category where a missing language stops a shipment rather than annoying a customer.
- The instruction manual. Installation, use, maintenance, troubleshooting. A manual in the wrong language is also the most common cause of a return that was not a product fault, which makes this the item where compliance and margin point the same way.
- The label and the identification of the responsible party. What the product is, who placed it on the market and where they can be reached, in the language of the country where it is sold, on the product or its packaging rather than only in a document inside the box.
- The pre-contractual information and the withdrawal form. Characteristics, total price, delivery, the right of withdrawal and the model form, the legal guarantee of conformity, complaints. Owed before the order, in a language the consumer being addressed can read.
- Sector-specific wording. Food, cosmetics, chemicals, toys, electrical equipment and medical items each carry mandatory statements whose wording is prescribed, and where a creative translation is a defect rather than a style choice.
What machine translation tells a European buyer about you
A European visitor reads a machine-translated product sheet the way you would read a contract with the wrong company name in it. Nothing is incomprehensible; everything is slightly off — the gender of a noun, a technical term rendered by its dictionary cousin, a sentence with the word order of another language. The conclusion is not « bad translation », it is « this seller is somewhere else », and from there: the return will go abroad, the warranty will be an argument, nobody will answer in my language. The sale is lost before the product has been evaluated. There is a search cost on top: a term translated by its wrong synonym is a term nobody types, so the page is not merely unconvincing, it is not found.
What to translate by a human, and in what order
- Anything with a legal or safety function: warnings, manual, label, mandatory statements, pre-contractual information, withdrawal form, warranty terms. Translated by a human, reviewed, and frozen under version control, because this is the text that gets quoted back at you.
- The pages that carry the contract: checkout steps, delivery and returns, terms of sale, the legal pages. A customer who hesitates reads these, and a mistranslation here reads as a trap rather than as clumsiness.
- Category names, product titles and specification labels — the words people actually type. These are short, cheap to get right, and they decide whether the page exists in search at all.
- The descriptions of your best sellers, written rather than translated: a native writer with your glossary and the product in hand produces a page that converts, where a translated sentence only informs.
- The after-sales templates: the acknowledgement, the return instructions, the warranty refusal, the delay apology. They are read at the worst moment, they are reused endlessly, and they are the cheapest reputation you will ever buy.
- Everything else: the long tail of the catalogue, blog content, secondary pages. Machine-drafted with your glossary enforced, then reviewed by a human who may skim — and corrected first wherever the analytics show people actually land.
How to build a product glossary that survives the next translator
A glossary is the only translation asset that compounds, and it is built from the market rather than from a dictionary. For each term, record the source word, the accepted equivalent in the target language, the alternatives that are forbidden and why, a short definition in plain words, and where the term appears — label, manual, product title, specification table. Collect the equivalents from how local buyers and local competitors name the thing, from the wording used in the relevant standards, and from what customers write in support tickets. Freeze your model names, part numbers and brand words as never-translate entries, and give the whole file to every human translator and to every machine pass so that the second translator cannot quietly rename your product.
Units, dates, addresses and the examples that do not travel
- Units and the decimal separator. Metric throughout, in the unit the local trade actually uses for that product family, with the separator used in that country — the detail that most often makes a specification table look foreign even when every word is right.
- Date order. The order of day, month and year differs across the markets you sell in, and an ambiguous delivery or warranty date is a support ticket waiting to happen. Writing the month in words removes the ambiguity entirely.
- The shape of an address block. Where the postcode sits, whether it precedes the city, how a street number is written, whether a region is expected. A checkout form that insists on a foreign address shape loses orders silently, because nobody writes to complain about a form.
- Name order and forms of address. Which part of a name is the family name, how a stranger is addressed in writing, and whether your templates use the formal register. Getting the register wrong in an after-sales message undoes a good translation.
- Sizes, voltages, plugs and paper formats. Expressed in the local convention, with the local equivalent given rather than a conversion the customer has to perform. A conversion the buyer must do is a reason to close the tab.
- Cultural examples and the calendar. Use cases, photographs, seasons and holidays referenced in marketing copy belong to a place. A campaign built around a festival the country does not keep reads as a translation of someone else's advertising.
Budget a reviewer who lives in the country, separately from the translation itself, and give them the finished pages rather than a spreadsheet of strings. Only someone living there catches the term that is technically correct and commercially dead, the register that sounds curt, the address field that does not fit their own address, and the example that belongs to another country. Have them review the funnel and the best sellers first, feed every correction back into the glossary, and keep the same reviewer across releases — a second opinion each time produces a catalogue that contradicts itself.