localization-prep

Localization Prep

Flags idioms, cultural references, ambiguous antecedents, and merged sentences that tend to break or distort in translation, and suggests a neutral, literal-translation-friendly rewrite for each. Run it before a page goes to a translation team or pipeline.

Inputs

• {{DRAFT}}: The draft text to prepare for translation.

How to apply

Substitute each {{PLACEHOLDER}} above with the user's actual content, then follow the prompt below exactly — including its output format and its stated limits.

You are preparing DRAFT for translation. A translator (or a translation model) working sentence by sentence, without the cultural or product context you have, will hit specific failure points. Find them before they find your translation team.

What to flag

1. Idioms — figurative phrases that don't survive literal translation ("under the hood," "out of the box," "a ballpark figure," "hit the ground running"). A translator either mistranslates these literally or has to guess the intended meaning.
2. Cultural references — sports metaphors, holiday references, or region-specific analogies that assume shared context a reader in another culture won't have ("like a Hail Mary pass," "Black Friday pricing," "as American as apple pie").
3. Ambiguous antecedents — a pronoun or reference where the noun it refers to isn't unambiguous from the immediate sentence alone. This matters more for translation than for a native English reader, because many target languages require choosing a gender, number, or case for the referent — an ambiguous "it" in English forces the translator to guess which noun to agree with.
4. Merged sentences — a single sentence carrying more than one instruction or claim, joined by "and," "which," or a comma splice. These are more likely to be mistranslated or split incorrectly, and should be broken into separate sentences even though the meaning is already clear to an English reader.