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How to write string descriptions to improve your product’s localised UX

Ben Davies-Romano
7 min readNov 2, 2023

Provide your translators with the context to find the best words in each language.

A few years (*cough 15 years shhh cough*) ago, one of my main freelance gigs was translation with a focus on product copy. Clients would send over a spreadsheet with strings, and I would… spend hours trying to find those strings in their apps to get enough context to find the right words.

Planet earth as seen from outer space in a cartoon illustration style, showing North and South America, Africa, and Europe.
An image of the globe? In an article about localisation? Groundbreaking.

So imagine my delight when one day, I received a spreadsheet not just with strings, but with screenshots and notes about the purpose of each string. It didn’t only save me hours, but it gave me much more confidence that my English translations were appropriate.

Context is key in ensuring we’re not just translating the individual words, but rather the UX as a whole. Without context, all that hard work your whole product team puts into creating a superb product is flushed down the toilet for any users who don’t speak English. To say that’s a waste is an understatement!

Fast forward to now, and one of my responsibilities as a content designer is working with translators to localise our product copy. And since that delightful spreadsheet, there’s a lot more info out there on providing string descriptions to give context. Indeed, most string and translation management systems have…

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Ben Davies-Romano
Ben Davies-Romano

Written by Ben Davies-Romano

UX, Product, Growth | https://www.linkedin.com/in/benjamin-w-davies/ Leading content design at Klarna | Founder of Tech Outcasts | ☕️ and 🏳️‍🌈

Responses (3)

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I wish I'd thought of this when I started out in UX 33 years ago. I was the designer on a project where we built a tool to easily create and manage GUI elements for Windows 3.0: bitmaps, cursors, icons, and stringtables. Adding per-string…

Thanks for the valuable article!!!

Gasp! I fully agree! This helps especially when working with country teams. By doing these we help our small and nimble localisation specialist to do what they need and are great at – localising! and sparing a huge load of time discussing and aligning with country folks. (those are needed at times, of course!)