June 15, 2002
A common approach to the EU is to translate everything into English first and fill in the local market later, once the product is selling. The trouble is that a share of the early work then has to be redone.
A common approach to the EU is to translate everything into English first and fill in each market's localization once the product is selling. The problem with that order is that part of the earlier work has to be redone. Language combinations get re-ordered by market, file formats get rebuilt for regulation, and reflowing an interface may drag the design along with it. The first spend is not entirely wasted, but it is close.
The more sensible order is to settle market priority and language combination before writing anything. Which markets first, which languages, whether product versions differ by market — those questions should be answered at the kick-off meeting, not patched after the first shipment.
The point of this checklist is to force those questions to the front. Walking it item by item is far cheaper than rework.
Language differences across EU member states are wide, and the practical set of languages is often smaller than expected — but the combination depends on the customer base. For industrial equipment with buyers concentrated in Germany, Austria and Switzerland, German matters more than ten smaller languages. For consumer products entering southern Europe, the Spanish-French-Italian combination looks different again. Rank markets by customer volume and regulatory risk, then set the language pairs and dialect variants.
One frequent mistake here is treating Europe as one market and covering it with English. For parts of the B2B world that works, but as soon as local sales terms, warranty and customer support are involved, the local language is close to mandatory. No customer accepts an unreadable warranty document because the product is good.
Ranking has a further benefit: when the budget is tight, you know which tier to cut. Teams with explicit market priorities rarely waste money on localization.
Technical files, declarations of conformity and instructions for use must be provided in each market's required language, with accuracy equal to the original. This is not advice, it is a condition of market access. Two traps here. One is assuming an English version suffices, when some markets explicitly require the national language. The other is instructions written in English but translated poorly, which amounts to not providing them at all.
Instructions for use need particular care, because they are the most inspected and the most read. Safety warnings, operating steps and maintenance intervals — get one number wrong and it is an incident. These should go to capable translators with review time budgeted; the review cost on this class of document is higher than on marketing copy, and that is normal.
If the product also enters the UK market, UKCA requirements need separate verification; do not assume they are identical to CE.
Sales terms, warranty and returns policies have legal force, and the risk level of localizing them is not in the same class as technical documentation. A mistranslated clause can change rights and obligations directly. This content should be handled by people with legal review capability — ideally a combination of language skill and knowledge of local consumer protection law.
After-sales content is often left to last, but it is the highest-frequency content of all. Knowledge base, agent scripts and FAQs change far faster than product documentation and need a planned maintenance mechanism, not a one-off translation. When the product changes or policy shifts, this content has to change with it.
Putting these on a continuous-maintenance list with a named owner and an update cycle is the only thing that holds. Bring the product type and target market to FangService and the market combination and file list can be walked through item by item.
The first is date and number format. Most of the EU writes dates as day, month, year; a quotation showing the third of the fourth can be read two ways, and mixing inches with millimetres in a drawing gets a European customer to send it straight back. The second is contact information. Unlike a domestic spec, European customers want email, phone and company registration details present, and the service pages especially. The third is the language of the warranty. Warranty follows the law of the country of sale, and a clause with no version in the language of that country leaves almost no interpretive room in a dispute.
None of these appear on a standard translation checklist, and all of them affect conversion. On European market deliveries FangService runs these format items separately: dates, units, addresses, international dialling formats, and local-language versions of warranty and return terms. The value of a checklist is not its length but that it pins down the items people take for granted.
Most teams take their export checklist from a peer's template. It looks complete, and yet something is always missing when applied to their own product, because the value of a checklist lies in fit: a battery maker and a small appliance maker face different certification requirements, and an agent channel and a direct e-commerce channel require different documents. A template is a starting point, nothing more.
Check along three dimensions. Product: applicable directives and standards, required declarations, labelling and warning text. Market: registration or notification requirements in the target country, language obligations, after-sales liability. Channel: documents for B2B tenders, credentials for e-commerce listing, and clearance paperwork. Walking all three makes the gaps visible by themselves.
FangService produces a gap analysis on those three dimensions at project start, stating which documents are mandatory, which are advantageous, and the effort each implies. Better a short gap report against your own product than a generic checklist that reassures nobody.
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