Case study · Shipping & logistics
A corporate website, in twelve languages.
The hardest thing we have done. A global container shipping and logistics group's website — the English rewritten, then the whole site delivered in twelve languages including English, loaded into the content management system, and read back page by page on the live templates.
Why it was hard
Not because of the volume. Because of the dependency chain. Twelve languages means every decision upstream — a template, a product name, a sentence in the English master — has eleven consequences downstream, and a decision reversed in week nine costs eleven times what it would have cost in week two.
A translation project that goes wrong almost never goes wrong in the translation. It goes wrong because the source was not finished, because nobody agreed what a product was called, or because the template could not hold the language.
How we ran it
- 01
Establishing what a page actually is
A corporate site of that size is not a set of pages, it is a set of templates with content poured into them. Before a word could be translated we had to agree what each template was for, which fields were editorial and which were structural, and what was allowed to vary by market. Get this wrong and you discover it in the eleventh language.
- 02
One English source, fixed
The other eleven derive from a single approved English master. That means the English has to be finished — genuinely finished, signed off, frozen — before anything else starts. The discipline nobody enjoys is refusing to begin translation on a page still in review, because a late change to the source multiplies by eleven.
- 03
A termbase before a translator
Product names, service names, legal entity names, the words that must never be translated, and the words that must always be translated the same way. Built with the client, agreed in writing, and given to every linguist before they saw a page. This is the single highest-leverage hour on a project like this.
- 04
Native writers, and a second native reader
Each language delivered by a native speaker and reviewed by a different native speaker against the English source. Eleven target languages is twenty-two linguists who all have to agree with a termbase they did not write.
- 05
Loading it into the CMS ourselves
The work did not end at a delivered document. Content went into the content management system, in place, in every language — which is where most translation projects quietly fall apart, because the agency hands over files and the client discovers that a German heading is forty per cent longer than the English one it has to fit.
- 06
Reading it back, live
Every language, every template, on the staging site. Not proofreading the document — checking the page: truncated headings, broken diacritics, a right-to-left artefact, a button whose label no longer fits, a language that silently fell back to English.
What we would tell you before you start one
- Length is a design problem, not a translation problem
- German runs long, Chinese runs short, and a template built to English measurements breaks in both directions. The time to discover that is in the template review, not on launch day.
- The termbase is the deliverable
- Long after the site went live, the termbase was the thing that kept every subsequent campaign, release and page consistent with it. A website is a moment; a termbase is an asset.
- Twelve languages is not twelve times one language
- It is one source, one termbase, one set of templates and one review discipline — applied eleven more times. The cost does not scale linearly, and neither does the risk: almost every failure is a source or a system failure, not a linguistic one.
- Somebody has to own the freeze
- The hardest conversation on the project was not about language. It was telling stakeholders that a change to an English sentence in week nine meant reopening eleven other versions.
What it left behind
A live site in twelve languages, and — more useful over the following years — an agreed termbase, a set of templates that had survived the worst case, and a house style that every later campaign could be measured against. We still write for this client.
If you are looking at a project like this
Tell us the number of languages, the CMS, and whether the English is finished. Those three answers determine almost everything about what it will cost and how long it will take.
Send us a brief The other seven mandates
Estimate within one working day.