Geo Pulse #54 — When machine translation costs you the GEO

Geo Pulse #54 — When machine translation costs you the GEO
Theme: "we translated the page" is not the same as "we localized it."

→ Raw MT on money pages. Auto-translation gets the words but breaks register, idiom, and trust signals. Fix: MT the body if you must, but human-edit headlines, CTAs, and proof elements — the parts that drive the click.

→ Formal vs informal address. German (du/Sie), French (tu/vous), Spanish (tú/usted) — wrong register reads as spam. MT picks one inconsistently across a page.

→ Numbers and formats leak the seam. Untranslated date order, decimal commas, and currency symbols scream "foreign page" even when the prose is fine.

→ Cheap safeguard. Have one native speaker read only the above-the-fold and the CTA. That's 10 minutes that catches 80% of trust-killers. Credit: localization QA folks who've seen "hot wife" mistranslations live in production.