Locale Conventions & File Handling
Lakh and crore, ambiguous dates, addresses and sorting, plus the file formats, tags, placeholders and expansion limits that decide whether your delivery works.
Locale errors are graded as real errors in every quality model, and some are critical: a misread date on a medical instruction or a misplaced decimal in a financial report is a safety or money problem. This course covers the conventions that translating the words leaves behind, with particular attention to the Indian numbering system, where confusing 10 million with 1 crore is a documented, recurring and expensive error. Then the technical half that gets deliveries rejected: why PDF is not a source format, what to do with XLIFF, TMX and subtitle files, why you never translate a key or a placeholder, encoding for Indic scripts, and designing for the 10 to 30% expansion translations typically bring. Ends with a 17-point pre-delivery checklist.
What you'll learn
- Treat locale conventions as a checklist item rather than an assumption
- Handle lakh, crore and separator differences without losing a factor of ten
- Disambiguate dates, addresses, names and sorting for the target market
- Work correctly with office, bilingual, subtitle and software file formats
- Keep tags and placeholders intact and query impossible agreement
- Run a 17-point pre-delivery check so files never come back
Course content
- 1. Why locale is not language (15 min)
- 2. Numbers, and the Indian numbering system (15 min)
- 3. Dates, addresses, names and sorting (15 min)
- 4. File formats: what you receive and what you must return (15 min)
- 5. Tags, placeholders, and text expansion (15 min)
- 6. A pre-delivery checklist you can reuse (15 min)
Related courses
- The Translation Quality Framework — Adequacy vs fluency, error typology, and a repeatable self-QA: the foundation every translator needs.
- CAT Tools Essentials — Get productive in Trados & memoQ, translation memory, termbases, match rates, and tags, so agency work stops feeling intimidating.
- Terminology & Style at Scale — Build and use glossaries and style guides that keep a big job, or a whole team, reading like one confident voice.