‹ Culture 3.14 · What we ask ourselves
Question · Language
What must stay invariant through a localisation?
Localising well requires deciding beforehand what cannot move, and that list is almost never written down.
Why it matters
A correct translation can alter a legal obligation, a figure or the scope of a guarantee without any linguistic review catching it. The text sounds right in both languages and means different things.
The risk does not lie in the general vocabulary but in the few elements the organisation cannot afford to move.
What we know so far
Figures, proper names, units, regulatory references and controlled terminology behave well as an explicit list of invariants, automatically checkable. Everything else can be reformulated, and in fact has to be able to be, for the text to work.
Writing that list with the client at the start of the project saves more review than any improvement to the model.
What remains open
Invariants that are not lexical remain unresolved: register, the degree of commitment in a promise, the distance from the reader.
Nor do we know what to do when an invariant is untranslatable in the target culture and keeping it produces a worse text.