Geo Pulse #43 — Translate, localize, or transcreate? Pick the tool to the stakes

Geo Pulse #43 — Translate, localize, or transcreate? Pick the tool to the stakes
This week: three different jobs people keep calling 'translation'.

— Raw MT (DeepL, Google) → use for internal research and reading competitor pages. Never ship it on a money page in a Tier-1 GEO; DeepL still beats Google noticeably on DE, NL, JA.
— MT + human post-edit (via a marketplace like Gengo) → the sweet spot for Tier-2 landing pages where budget is real but thin. Costs ~30-50% of full human at near-human quality.
— Native transcreation (in-market freelancer) → reserve for ad creative, hooks, and CTAs, where a literal translation kills CTR even when it's 'correct'.
— Locale QA tools (lokalise, Crowdin) → not translators; they catch the silent killers — truncated buttons, wrong date/number formats, untranslated alt text.

The trap: paying for transcreation on body copy and shipping MT on the headline. Invert that.

Credit: the localization-tier breakdowns from Nataly Kelly's writing and the Crowdin blog.