How it works

Inside the Nederlandse Storefront Starter: how we turn a zero-Dutch storefront into ready-to-paste native copy

Most stores we work with today have little or no Dutch/Belgian content — so the deliverable isn't a fix list, it's native copy for your homepage, best-selling products, and policy pages, written to go straight into Shopify admin. We document our own process because most "translation audit" offers are a black box. Here's exactly what happens when we run one, including the real numbers from a full-size run — not marketing rounding.

Published by the Localization Audit team · updated 2026-08-12

Step 1 — Crawl the storefront

We pull every product page, on-site marketing copy, and policy page (privacy policy, terms, shipping/returns) directly from the live storefront — structured by page type, not a raw text dump. On a real 60-product store, this step takes under 15 seconds and typically surfaces 70+ pages.

Step 2 — Deduplicate and filter

Product catalogs repeat a lot of boilerplate (shipping notes, size charts, care instructions) across every product. We deduplicate identical sentences before review, which cuts the review workload by roughly 15–30% depending on how repetitive the catalog is — and filter out pure UI noise (button labels, nav chrome) that doesn't need linguistic judgment.

Step 3 — Write (or rewrite) sentence-by-sentence, then review

On the stores we see most often, there's no existing Dutch to correct — so this step writes native NL/BE copy from the source content rather than patching a translation. (On the minority of stores that do have existing Dutch, it's a rewrite pass instead — same rubric, different starting point.) Either way, every sentence is checked against the same rubric: natural idiomatic phrasing, correct formal/informal register (critical on legal pages), Flemish-vs-Dutch variant checks, and disciplined non-fabrication — if source content is truncated or ambiguous, we flag it for a human decision instead of guessing at a "plausible" line. On a realistic 60-product store this is around 700–800 sentences, covered in full — zero silent gaps.

To keep this step fast, we run it as a parallelized pass rather than one long sequential read-through: on a real 782-sentence run, splitting review across 8 concurrent passes brought total review time down to just over 10 minutes, versus an estimated 47 minutes sequential.

Step 4 — Conversion/checkout check

Separately from the language review, we check calls-to-action, trust signals, and checkout copy against Dutch/Belgian shopper expectations: local payment methods (iDEAL, Bancontact), shipping/return norms, and appropriate urgency/trust tone. This step cites the store's own copy directly rather than generic advice — e.g. "you mention iDEAL here, but not Bancontact, even though your locale list includes Belgium."

Step 5 — Combined, prioritized report

Everything gets combined into one report, ranked by real severity — untranslated content and legal-tone errors ranked above minor style polish, not the other way around, so the first thing a client sees is what actually matters.

What we don't do

We don't invent copy for content we can't confidently read. If a source sentence is cut off mid-word by a scraping artifact, or a policy clause looks internally contradictory, we flag it for a human to check against the original rather than writing a plausible-sounding guess. We'd rather hand over a slightly shorter deliverable you can trust completely than a longer one you have to double-check.