localization-pass

Localization Pass · 7-Dimension Adaptation + Multilingual Audit

Single-article locale adaptation OR portfolio-wide multilingual quality audit.

When to invoke

• During /article pipeline when state.brief.target_market_locale != "en-US"
• /locale-audit <directory> — portfolio audit of existing multilingual content
• After /article translation runs to verify per-language SEO parity
• /locale-check workspace/{task}/draft.md — single-file dialect check

Mode 1 · Per-article dialect gate + 7-dimension adaptation

Wired v3.35 (2026-07-04): the dialect check is now the mandatory locale-spelling-check orchestrator stage — it runs on EVERY article (including en-US, where its production value is catching en-GB spellings leaking from model training data: "colour/organise/whilst" in en-US prose is an AI-tell). The executor existed since v5.0 with zero invocations (Rule 6). Evidence + thresholds: references/seo/serp-feature-value-2026.md §5.

Applied during the Optimize phase; the FULL 7-dimension adaptation applies when the target locale differs from US-English defaults.

The 7 dimensions

#	Dimension	Example transformation
1	Currency	$199 → £169 / €189 / ¥21,000
2	Units	inches → cm, lb → kg, miles → km, °F → °C
3	Spelling dialect	color → colour, organize → organise, customize → customise
4	Idioms	"drop the ball" (US) → "let the side down" (UK) / direct translation (non-EN)
5	Regulations	FTC → ASA (UK) / ACCC (AU) / KSA (KR) / 消费者权益保护法 (CN)
6	Tone	US casual → UK formal / JP polite (敬語) / DE direct
7	Date format	MM/DD/YYYY → DD/MM/YYYY / YYYY-MM-DD / 令和7年

Workflow

# Step 1 (WIRED, mandatory stage — runs automatically in the pipeline):
python -m scripts.lint.spelling_dialect_check --workspace {task_id} --json
# Resolves target dialect from state.brief.target_market_locale (en-US default).
# Exempt zones: References/Further Reading tail, blockquotes, code, link URLs,
# Capitalized mid-sentence proper nouns ("Labour Party", "Centre for ...").
# Gate: FAIL at drift_count >= 3 (systemic drift); 1-2 hits = warnings.
# Output: workspace/{task}/locale-spelling-lint.json (passed flag enforced by
# the orchestrator, run_pipeline._GATE_STAGES, and the pre-publish gate).

# Step 2 (repair, when the gate FAILs): apply drift_words[].use_instead
# replacements directly (deterministic word swaps — surgical Edit, cheapest
# route), then the freshness rule re-runs Step 1 automatically.
# NOTE (correction, v3.35): the pre-v3.35 claim that "the humanizer agent
# handles the locale layer" was FALSE — the humanizer has no locale code. For
# non-English locales the dialect gate no-ops and the 7-dimension adaptation
# below remains an LLM editing task guided by references/localization/{locale}.md.

# Legacy single-file form (manual diagnostics):
python -m scripts.lint.spelling_dialect_check --input {path}.md --target en-UK --json