Once you have customers in more than one country, your English-only videos start to show their limits. Some customers will follow along fine. Others will turn on auto-generated captions, get a rough machine translation of your feature names, and give up halfway.
Localizing everything sounds expensive, and done the old way, it was. It helps to know that there are levels, and most teams only need the middle ones.
The four levels of video localization
| Level | What changes | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Subtitles | Translated captions; voice and UI stay in English | Audiences comfortable with English UI who prefer reading in their language |
| 2. Translated narration | Voice and captions in the target language; UI stays in English | Most B2B SaaS; customers use the English UI but learn better in their language |
| 3. Localized UI | Video recorded with the product set to the target language | Products that ship a translated interface |
| 4. Full localization | UI, voice, captions, examples, currencies, names | Key markets, launch videos, and onboarding |
A practical rule: if your product interface is not translated, stop at level 2. Showing an English UI while the narration names German labels that do not exist is worse than either alone.
Who needs which level
- Help center tutorials: level 2 for your top languages. Customers are mid-task and want instructions they understand quickly.
- Onboarding videos: level 2 or 3. First impressions matter, and setup is where language friction causes drop-off.
- Homepage and launch videos for a target market: level 4, at least for the one or two markets you are actively selling into.
- Internal training: often level 1 is enough, especially for teams that work in English day to day.
Write the original so it translates well
The cheapest localization work happens before you translate anything, in the English script.
- Use short sentences with one idea each. Long sentences with clauses come out tangled in other languages.
- Avoid idioms and wordplay. "Hit the ground running" and "a no-brainer" do not survive translation.
- Name the UI element exactly, so translators can match it to your localized interface strings.
- Leave room. German and French text often runs noticeably longer than English, and narration does too. A script that already fills every second will feel rushed in translation.
- Avoid on-screen text baked into the video, such as typed titles or callouts. Use captions and overlays that can be swapped per language.
Build a glossary first
Before translating a single video, make a short list of your product's terms and decide how each one is handled. Feature names are usually kept in English. Generic words like "workspace", "invoice", or "dashboard" are usually translated, but consistently. Write it down once, share it with whoever reviews translations, and you avoid three different translations of the same button across your help center.
| Term | German | Spanish | Rule |
|---|---|---|---|
| Workspace | Arbeitsbereich | Espacio de trabajo | Translate |
| Smart Folders (feature name) | Smart Folders | Smart Folders | Keep in English |
| Invoice | Rechnung | Factura | Translate |
| Settings | Einstellungen | Configuración | Match the localized UI string |
Review with a native speaker
Machine translation is good enough to draft almost everything now. It is not good enough to publish without a check, especially for narration, where an odd phrase is heard rather than skimmed. Ask a native-speaking colleague, customer, or partner to watch each translated video once. They will catch the handful of lines that sound wrong, and those are the lines that make a video feel cheap.
Keep translations in step with the original
The hidden cost of localization is maintenance. When the English video changes, every translated version is now out of date. Keep each language tied to the same source video, so that an update to the original flows into its translations instead of being forgotten. This is the multilingual version of the problem in how to keep product videos up to date.
In Steperly
In Steperly you add a language to a guide and get its narration and captions in that language, from the same recording. Each language stays attached to the original guide, so it is always clear which versions belong together. See translation workflows for details, and AI voiceover for product videos for how to make translated narration sound natural.