Multilingual Ad Localization Cheatsheet
A localisation lookup sheet: translate vs transcreate, character-expansion and caption budgets, currency and claims by market, casting/voice rules, and the native QA gate before you buy traffic.
One click will translate a winner; it will not make it native. This sheet is the localisation lookup: when to transcreate the hook, how much on-screen text will swell, which claims and prices must change, and the native QA gate before a dollar of new-market spend.
Localisation is production, not market strategy
Rebuilding the spoken layer of a proven 15–30s cut — new script, new voice, regenerated lip-sync, same edit — is how you get a Spanish or Hindi file in minutes instead of a new shoot. That is production. It does not choose the country, the offer, the payment method, or the legal line. Teams that localise a weak English loser into four languages multiply a miss. Teams that localise a winner without changing currency, shipping, or a health claim multiply a policy problem. Lock the source cell first: it has to be a win on sample, not a favourite. Then treat each target language as a new launch with its own QA, not as an export preset. The click is the cheap part; the sheet is the part that keeps you from buying traffic on a subtitle.
Hooks transcreate; bodies can translate
Translate keeps meaning. Transcreate keeps effect. Openers live on idiom, humour, rhyme and cultural reference, which a literal pass flattens into something that sounds like a subtitle. Feature lists, fabric weight, a 20-second demo, and a straight offer line often survive a faithful translation. The working split: write the first 3 seconds natively (or from a native brief), translate the body, keep the edit unless a joke or a gesture does not travel. If the first line still sounds like the English sentence with different phonemes, you translated a hook that needed transcreation. That is not the model failing; that is the job being harder than swap-the-words. On-screen type is a second language: a burned-in English pack shot will still be English after the voice changes.
Markets disagree about money, faces and claims
A US sale price spoken into a UK or EU cart is a mismatch, not a localisation. Shipping windows, returns, VAT-inclusive prices, and units (oz vs ml, lb vs kg) have to be rewritten, not dubbed. Casting is not cosmetic: a face and a voice that read as ‘imported American UGC’ can tax hook rate even when the words are correct. Claims are stricter in some geos than the source ad assumed — health, income, environmental, and before/after rules do not copy-paste. The locked tables give expansion budgets for captions (German and Finnish are not English-length), a market-entry order that is about logistics rather than vibes, and a native-speaker QA that is a pass/fail, not ‘we have a cousin who speaks it’.
How to use the tables on a real winner
Start with the translate-vs-transcreate grid on the actual script beats, not on the whole file. Run character-expansion on every burned-in card before you render. Fill currency, units, and claims for the target geo. Recast only if the casting table says the source face will tax trust. Then the native QA list on a phone, muted first. When you localise a 3×2 grid, a product-URL pipeline in Klip Kanvas can rebuild the spoken layer per language — still recut first-frame type and still run native QA. A green render is not a green market.
6 lookup tables inside: translate vs transcreate by beat, caption/character-expansion budgets, currency-units-claims by market type, casting & voice rules, market-entry order, and the native phone QA gate.
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