Product Translation Audit
Scores the quality of a product catalogue's translations market by market, and returns concrete rewrites for what drags the score down. It judges a translation the way a shop owner should: not "is it correct?" but "does it sell, does it get found, and will it get us in trouble?"
A literal, grammatically perfect translation can still be a bad product page. This skill is built to catch exactly that.
When to use
- "how good are our German product translations", "audit the product copy for the French shop"
- After a machine-translation run, a new market launch, or a PIM migration.
- When a locale converts or ranks worse than the source market and nobody knows why.
Do not use it to translate a catalogue — this audits and recommends. Bulk translation is a separate job.
Step 1 — Establish the inputs
- Source of data: a PIM or shop export (CSV/XLSX/JSON), a connected store API, or pasted product records. Ask for the export if nothing is connected.
- Fields in scope: product title, short and long description, bullet points, attributes and their values, variant names, category names, meta title and description, URL slug, alt text.
- Source locale and target locales — and which market each serves.
de-DE,de-ATandde-CHare different markets with different terms, sizes, and price expectations; never audit them as one. - Sampling. Catalogues are large and quality is not uniform. Audit a stratified sample, not the first N rows: the top sellers by revenue, a slice of the mid tail, a slice of the long tail, plus every product in any category launched recently. State the sample size and how it was chosen. Never present a sample's score as the whole catalogue's without saying so.
Step 2 — Score each locale on seven dimensions
Score 1–5 per dimension with a one-line justification and real examples. Weight them by commercial impact, not by how easy they are to measure:
| # | Dimension | Weight | What fails it |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Accuracy | 20% | Wrong meaning, dropped qualifiers, invented features, mixed languages in one field |
| 2 | Search fit | 25% | Translated the word instead of the term buyers actually search for in that market |
| 3 | Persuasiveness | 20% | Reads like a translation: literal source syntax, no benefit framing, dead CTA |
| 4 | Consistency | 15% | The same attribute or product term rendered differently across the catalogue |
| 5 | Formats and units | 10% | Sizes, measurements, currency, decimal separators, dates left in source convention |
| 6 | Technical integrity | 5% | Broken placeholders, stray HTML, truncated fields, encoding damage |
| 7 | Compliance surface | 5% | Legally required information missing or left in the source language |
Report the weighted total per locale, plus the per-dimension breakdown. A single number hides where the money is.
Step 3 — What to look for, in detail
Search fit — usually the biggest lever. Buyers search their own vocabulary, not a dictionary's. German shoppers type Turnschuhe and Sneaker in different contexts; British shoppers say trainers, not sneakers; a jumper is not a sweater. Flag every title and H1 where the head term is a literal translation of the source rather than the market's term. If a keyword tool or Search Console is connected, use its data. If it is not, say so and label the suggestion a hypothesis to validate — never state search volumes from memory.
Consistency. Attribute values drive faceted navigation. If Navy is Marineblau on one product and Dunkelblau on another, the colour filter silently splits the catalogue in two. Build a term frequency table per attribute and flag every value with competing variants. The same applies to recurring marketing phrases and category names.
Untouchables. Brand names, model designations, SKUs, and certification marks stay exactly as they are — Air Max is not Luft Max. Flag anything translated that should not have been. Material composition and care symbols are usually regulated wording, not copy.
Length budgets. German runs roughly 20–35% longer than English, Finnish longer still; CJK much shorter. Check every field against its real limit — the PDP layout, and any channel the feed goes to (marketplace title caps, Google Shopping title and description limits). A title that truncates mid-word costs clicks.
Formats. Sizes need market conversion (US 10 / UK 9 / EU 43), not translation. Check measurement units, currency and its position, decimal and thousands separators, date order, and address or phone formats in shipping copy.
Machine-translation tells. Source word order preserved intact; formal/informal register flipping within one page; a glossary term translated three ways in three paragraphs; idioms rendered literally; gender agreement wrong on adjectives. List them as examples, not as a verdict on the whole locale.
Compliance surface. Note where legally required information appears absent or untranslated — ingredients, allergens, safety warnings, energy labels, warranty and return terms. Report it as needs legal review in that market, with the field and the product. This skill flags gaps; it does not give legal advice and never certifies a listing as compliant.
Step 4 — Recommend, concretely
Findings without a rewrite are noise. For each issue give:
- the product and field,
- the current text,
- a proposed rewrite,
- one line on why it is better, in commercial terms,
- effort (single field / template / catalogue-wide) and expected impact (high / medium / low).
Group by fix pattern, not by product: "the head term Sneaker should be Turnschuhe in 340 titles" is one decision, not 340. Lead with the patterns that touch the most revenue.
Rank the work: what to fix this week (high impact, mechanical), what needs a native reviewer, and what is cosmetic. Say plainly which locales are healthy enough to leave alone.
Rules
- Never invent search volumes, competitor data, or market statistics. Either it comes from connected data, or it is labelled a hypothesis.
- Never rate a translation on grammar alone — a flawless sentence that misses the market term still fails.
- Never claim a listing is legally compliant. Flag gaps for a human with jurisdiction knowledge.
- Never modify the catalogue. This skill produces a report; applying changes is a separate, confirmed action.
- Never assume one locale per language.
pt-PTandpt-BR,es-ESandes-MX,zh-Hansandzh-Hantare separate audits. - Where the source copy itself is weak, say so — translating bad copy faithfully produces bad copy in every market.
- Keep every quoted example verbatim, including the errors. Do not silently clean up what you quote.
Output format
Catalogue: <name> Source: <en-GB> Sampled: <n> of <N> products (<method>)
SCORECARD
locale total acc search persu consis format tech compl
de-DE 3.4 4 2 3 3 4 5 3
fr-FR 4.1 4 4 4 4 4 5 4
TOP PATTERNS TO FIX
1 de-DE Search fit 340 titles use "Sneaker" where "Turnschuhe" is the
category term buyers search — hypothesis, validate with Search Console
Effort: template Impact: high
2 de-DE Consistency Colour "Navy" appears as Marineblau / Dunkelblau /
Navy across 87 products — splits the colour filter
Effort: catalogue-wide find-replace Impact: high
EXAMPLE REWRITES
SKU 88213 · de-DE · title
now: "Herren Sneaker Leder Schwarz Komfortabel Atmungsaktiv"
to: "Herren Turnschuhe Leder Schwarz - atmungsaktiv, 42-46"
why: market head term, keyword stuffing removed, size range added (filter + trust)
NEEDS LEGAL REVIEW (<n>)
SKU 41902 · de-DE · care instructions left in English
HEALTHY: fr-FR, nl-NL — no action recommended
License
MIT