What is Localization Style Guide?

A localization style guide documents how your product should sound in each target language: tone and register, formality (the du versus Sie decision in German, tú versus usted in Spanish), capitalization rules, punctuation conventions, how to treat units and currencies, and how to handle names, placeholders, and untranslatable terms.

It answers the questions every translator otherwise decides alone. Should the UI address the user formally? Are button labels imperative or nominal? Do you localize decimal separators in marketing copy? Individually small, these choices compound into whether the product feels coherent or stitched together.

The guide complements the termbase: the termbase fixes what words to use, the style guide fixes how to write everything else. Keep it short enough to be read, one or two pages per language, and treat translator questions as the backlog: every question asked twice becomes a new line in the guide. Concrete good and bad examples help more than abstract rules.