Prism Language Solutions localizes websites, web and mobile apps and product content for US companies selling abroad and for foreign companies entering the US: translation of every string by a native linguist, adaptation of dates, units, currencies, imagery and tone for the target market, and delivery in the files your build uses, from CMS exports to JSON, XLIFF and resource files. Work is priced per source word with translation memory so updates cost only what changed, and the quote is fixed before anything starts.
Last reviewed September 11, 2026 by Sarah J, Prism Language Solutions
A website is not a document. It is a few thousand fragments of text held in a database, a codebase and a handful of images, rendered in layouts sized for English, with links, forms and error messages that have to keep working after every fragment changes. Translating it the way you would translate a brochure produces a site where the buttons overflow, the checkout errors are in English, the date picker is in the wrong order and the search engine indexes the wrong version. This page sets out what localization adds to translation, how the process runs, and what to send so we can quote it. Marketing copy that lives off the site is under business translation.
- Certified translations prepared to meet USCIS requirements
- Human linguists only, matched to the subject
- Fixed written quote within 60 minutes in business hours
- One office in New York, linguists in every state
What Website Localization Adds to Translation
Translation renders the words. Localization makes the result usable in the market. That means dates in the order the reader expects, decimal commas where the market uses them, prices in local currency with local tax wording, addresses and phone fields that accept local formats, sizes and units the customer shops in, and imagery and examples that do not read as foreign. It means legal text (privacy policies, terms, cookie notices, returns) reviewed for the target jurisdiction rather than translated blind. And it means handling the mechanics: text expansion (German and French run 20 to 30 percent longer than English, Chinese and Japanese shorter), right-to-left layout for Arabic and Hebrew, plural rules that differ by language, and strings assembled from fragments that make grammatical sense only in English.
The practical difference shows up in the questions we ask before quoting. Which markets, not just which languages: Spanish for Mexico and Spanish for Spain are different jobs. Which content is customer-facing and which is internal. Whether the site has a translation workflow or whether we are the workflow.
Mobile App Localization
Apps are localized from string files rather than from pages: Android XML, iOS strings and stringsdict, .NET resx, Flutter ARB, or a JSON export from a localization platform. We translate in those formats so the files drop back into the build without hand-editing, keep every placeholder and variable intact, and respect the length limits a developer flags for buttons and notifications. Context is the recurring problem: a string that reads only Save could be a verb or a noun, and a translator working from a spreadsheet cannot tell. We ask for screenshots or a staging build, and we return a list of strings that were ambiguous so the developer can confirm before release. Store listings, in-app purchase descriptions and support articles are localized alongside the app so the marketing matches the product.
Product Content Localization
Catalogs, product pages, specifications, size guides, care labels and the thousands of near-identical descriptions an e-commerce site carries. This is volume work where translation memory and a product glossary do most of the lifting; the first hundred product pages set the terms and the next thousand reuse them. We convert units and sizes to the market’s system, keep the source figure where a regulator or a customer might need it, and hold brand and product names in the glossary so they are never adapted by accident. Where product data lives in a PIM or a marketplace feed, we work from the export and return it in the same structure with the same identifiers, so the import is mechanical.
Website Localization Process
The process is the same for a ten-page site and a ten-thousand-page one; only the tooling scales.
- Scoping. Content export from the CMS or repository, word count by section, identification of what is customer-facing, legal, or generated, and a list of untranslatable strings (brand names, code, product IDs).
- Glossary and style guide. Key terms agreed with you before translation starts, including tone (formal or informal address matters in most languages) and what stays in English.
- Translation and review. A native translator per language, a second linguist reviewing against the source, translation memory building as they go.
- In-context review. The translated site or build checked in a browser or on a device for overflow, truncation, broken placeholders and layout in right-to-left languages.
- Delivery and updates. Files returned in the export format; later changes quoted on the changed strings only, with the memory doing the rest.
Multilingual SEO for Localized Websites
A localized site that search engines cannot tell apart from the original is wasted money. Two things matter most. Page titles, meta descriptions, headings and URL slugs are localized as search terms, not translated as sentences, because the phrase a buyer types in Mexico is rarely the literal translation of the one typed in Texas; we research the target-language terms rather than guess. And the language versions are declared to search engines with hreflang annotations: Google’s documentation asks that each version reference itself and every other version, in both directions, using an ISO 639-1 language code with an optional ISO 3166-1 region code, and warns that annotations that do not point back are ignored. We supply the annotations with the translated content so a developer can implement them in the HTML, the HTTP headers or the sitemap. Machine-translated pages served as if they were localized content are the one thing we advise against on every project.
What to Send for a Website Localization Quote
The fastest route to a fixed price is a content export rather than a URL. A URL lets us estimate; an export from the CMS, the string files from the repository, or a sitemap plus a crawl lets us count. Alongside it, tell us the target markets and languages, whether the site has an existing translation workflow or plugin, any glossary or previous translations, the length limits your design imposes, and the launch date. A project manager returns a quote by section and by language, so you can localize the checkout and the top fifty product pages first and the blog later, usually within a business day. Per-word guide rates for web and software content are on the pricing page; a fixed deadline that needs overnight work is quoted as rush translation.
Ready to start? Send the document or the booking details through the quote form, call +1 (833) 282 8883, or email info@prismlinguistics.com. You get a fixed written price within 60 minutes during business hours.