Translation stopped being about accuracy and started being about judgement. The machine gets the words; what it cannot get is whether the sentence is appropriate for the person reading it.
What to put in the public brief
- The languages and the market, which are not the same thing
- Roughly how much text
- Whether it is marketing copy, product strings or legal-adjacent
- Whether they are translating or reviewing existing output
Keep the copy itself private. Unreleased marketing text in a public brief is a leak with a price on it.
What to put in the private instructions
Give the source text and say what it is for
The same sentence translates differently for a push notification, a landing page and a terms page.
State the register explicitly
Formal or informal address is a decision, not a detail, and in several languages there is no neutral option to fall back on.
Name what must not be translated
Brand names, product names, and any string that appears in code. A translated variable name is a bug.
Ask them to flag rather than smooth
"Tell me anything that is fine in English and awkward here" is the question that finds the expensive problems.
Proof worth requiring
Ask for
The translated text, a short note on any choice they made deliberately, and their market — the country they live in, not only the language they speak.
Do not ask for
A certification or a qualification. For short marketing copy the useful credential is living in the market this month, and requiring credentials filters for the wrong thing while raising the price.
When this task type is the wrong tool
If the text is legal, medical or financial, this is not the right instrument and the saving is not worth it. Use a professional service with liability attached.
If you need the whole product localised rather than a block of copy, localisation services covers the difference between the two, and it is larger than it looks.