Deep dive

The 3 sentences that make a Dutch shopper stop trusting your policy page

Dutch legal writing has one rule that matters more than any grammar point: pick a register — formal ("u/uw") or informal ("je/jouw") — and hold it for the entire document. Policy pages almost always default to formal. The mistake we find most often isn't using the wrong register throughout; it's switching mid-document, usually for one or two sentences, without anyone noticing.

Published by the Localization Audit team · updated 2026-07-24

Formal by default, and why it's not just a style choice

Privacy policies, terms of service, and returns/withdrawal clauses are read differently than product copy. A Dutch shopper skimming a product page in the informal "je/jouw" register reads it as friendly. The same shopper reading a privacy policy in "je/jouw" reads it as under-drafted — legal documents in the Netherlands and Belgium are expected to hold the formal register the way an English-language contract is expected to avoid contractions. It's a genre convention, not a preference.

Where it actually breaks: one bolted-on clause

We almost never find a whole policy page in the wrong register. We find one clause — usually the one added later, by a different process than the rest of the page. Payment-provider clauses (Klarna, PayPal, buy-now-pay-later add-ons) are the single most common source: the surrounding policy was translated and reviewed as one document, then a payment-provider clause was appended afterward, often copy-pasted from a template that was never register-checked against the rest of the page.

Two words changed. Nothing about the meaning changed. But a Dutch or Belgian reader notices the seam immediately, and the effect isn't "this sentence is informal" — it's "was this whole page actually reviewed by someone, or just assembled from pieces?"

Why one slip undermines the whole page, not just the sentence

A register slip on a product description costs you a slightly-off tone. A register slip on a policy page costs you something closer to legal credibility: the entire point of a privacy policy or terms page is to signal "we did this properly." One sentence that reads like it was pasted in from somewhere else quietly reopens the question of whether the rest of the page was actually reviewed, or just machine-translated and left alone.

A 3-point self-check

If you're checking your own store, these are the three places we'd look first — not because they're the only places it happens, but because they're where a clause is most likely to have been added separately from the rest of the page:

• Payment-provider clauses — Klarna, PayPal, buy-now-pay-later, and similar add-ons are frequently inserted after the main policy translation pass, by whoever integrated the payment method rather than whoever wrote the policy.
• Cookie-consent banners — these are often rendered by a separate third-party script with its own (sometimes untranslated, sometimes wrong-register) copy, completely disconnected from the rest of your legal pages.
• Returns / right-of-withdrawal clauses — one of the most commonly copy-pasted sections between stores, and one of the easiest places for a template's original register to survive untouched.

Read those three sections out loud, back to back with the rest of the page. If one of them feels like a different person wrote it, it probably was.