Welcome to Translation Review Week, where we plan to spend each day (except for Wacky Word Wednesday, of course!) dissecting and analyzing review practices in the localization industry, paying special attention to why translation review makes people want to cross their eyes and scream, and what we as a community—both translation buyers and providers alike—can do to fix it.

To begin, it’s important to note that there are no one-size-fits-all solutions when it comes to translation QA. There are, however, a good many pitfalls that limit the success of the review process.

To limit your exposure to these pitfalls, it’s important for translation buyers to first identify why you’re performing reviews and, based on that information, determine what types of reviews you want, and then how and by whom they should be performed. In order to clearly understand the focus of in-house and/or third-party translation review, however, it’s necessary to take a step back and look at the bigger picture.

For as much emphasis as people put on the translation side of localization, it’s refreshing to come across some real-life examples of localization in the true sense of the word, where localized products aren’t just carbon copies of their source products, but truly redesigned and re-marketed for their target locales.

While I was sweating my [censored] off in Beijing’s subway the other day, I noticed a really cool shirt that only the nerdiest of localization nerds could appreciate. So I thought I’d share it with you ‘cause, hey… it’s localicious. (That’s right, I said “localicious.” It’s a new adjective that means awesomely localized. Use it, translate it. Make it viral, folks, ‘cause we need some more lively terms in this industry. In fact, I’m going to go add it to TermWiki right now.)

Anyway, before I talk about the T-shirt, you’re going to need some background information on Chinese eye exams. You’ve probably never even thought about this before—I know I didn’t until I lost a pair of glasses on an unruly jet-ski in Sanya—but eye charts in China don’t start with a giant capital E followed by a bunch of other letters in the Latin alphabet.