Did you know that the number of exclamation marks in Dutch translations is much lower than in the English source?

Too many sentences ending in exclamation marks? It sounds like shouting to us!

And it is not only about the exclamation marks themselves. That is really only a sign of a deeper-lying issue that is the result of differences between our cultures.

Has your revenue abroad gone down recently, and you don't know why?

The reason could be simpler than you think.

Chances are your foreign-language content is not performing well.

If you have started using AI translations, your communication may miss the mark completely.

Even if you had your AI translations checked and corrected, and they are free of errors, mistranslations and hallucinations, they will typically lack that essential connection with your customer.

The feeling your customer should have - that you understand them.

Quick quiz for speakers of Dutch!

How do you translate: "I hope this email finds you well"?

If you are planning to have your software localized, string concatenation is a habit worth breaking.

String concatenation is the process of joining short strings to form a new string: e.g. sentence_start + variable + sentence_end.

Appending strings together like that almost always results in localization bugs, because word order, prefixes, suffixes, and grammar rules vary significantly across languages.

If you are planning on having your software localized, this is a practice you should avoid.

When developing your code, you should never hard-code user-facing strings - i.e. embed them directly into the source code.

Why?

Hard-coding slows down the localization process tremendously. Either you will have to extract the strings to pass them on to your translators, which is a slow, error-prone, and expensive process, or it forces translators to read through source code to identify segments that require translation, risking both omissions and inadvertent changes that will interfere with the website’s functionality.

If you ask me to translate a document for you, I could ask you a lot of questions to make sure the document is fully aligned with your expectations.

But I won’t.

Just let me handle it.

You expect a quality translation, the Dutch equivalent of your English copy, and I will deliver that. Without any hassle.

Unless your text contains an error, or something is really unclear, I will not bother you while I am translating your text.