| CASE STUDY Scaling Temu Globally Across 13 Languages A Large-Scale TEP & Proofreading Success Story in E-Commerce Localisation |
| 13 Target Languages | 15M+ Words Delivered | 2 Service Types (TEP & Proofreading) | 100% Quality Benchmarks Met | 2 Languages Resolved via Training |
Client Overview
Temu is one of the world’s fastest-growing e-commerce marketplaces, connecting hundreds of millions of consumers with an extraordinarily broad range of products at competitive prices. Launched internationally in 2022, Temu rapidly expanded its footprint across North America, Europe, Asia, Africa, and beyond, establishing itself as a formidable player in the global online retail landscape within a remarkably short timeframe.
Temu’s platform is built on delivering an accessible, intuitive, and locally resonant shopping experience to customers in every market it operates in. As the platform accelerated its expansion into linguistically diverse regions, the need for accurate, culturally appropriate, and high-volume localised content became one of its most pressing operational priorities. Product listings needed to speak directly to consumers in their own language, while legal pages required the precision and formality demanded by regulators across multiple jurisdictions.
To meet this demand at scale, Temu partnered with our team to deliver professional Translation, Editing and Proofreading (TEP) and standalone Proofreading services across 13 languages, spanning five continents and some of the most linguistically diverse and challenging language pairs in the world.
Project Overview
The engagement with Temu was one of the largest and most linguistically diverse projects our team has undertaken. The scope encompassed two distinct content types, product listings and legal pages, each with its own requirements for tone, accuracy, and cultural sensitivity, delivered across 13 target languages simultaneously.
Product listings demanded high-volume throughput with market-appropriate language that would appeal to local consumers. Legal pages, by contrast, required meticulous precision, terminological consistency, and compliance-grade accuracy across different legal traditions and languages. Managing both content streams simultaneously, across 13 language pairs, at a volume exceeding 15 million words, required an exceptionally structured and scalable approach.
| Services Provided Translation, Editing & Proofreading (TEP) | Proofreading |
Scope at a Glance
- Total Volume: 15 million+ words
- Number of Languages: 13 target languages
- Content Types: Product listings and legal pages
- Services: Full TEP (Translation, Editing & Proofreading) and standalone Proofreading
- Engagement Type: Large-scale, long-term ongoing partnership
- Outcome: Partnership continued and expanded to additional languages
Target Languages
The project covered 13 target languages spanning major global regions, including widely spoken languages and several less commonly resourced language pairs:
- European: French, Turkish, Danish, Slovenian, Icelandic, Maltese
- Middle Eastern: Hebrew
- African: Swahili, Zulu
- South & Southeast Asian: Khmer, Sinhalese
- Central Asian: Uzbek, Georgian
Content Types
- Product Listings: High-volume, consumer-facing content covering product titles, descriptions, categories, specifications, and attributes. Speed and market-appropriateness were critical, translations needed to feel natural and persuasive to local shoppers, not like direct translations of English source text.
- Legal Pages: Compliance-critical documents including terms and conditions, privacy policies, refund policies, and user agreements. These required absolute precision, formal register, terminological consistency, and sensitivity to the legal conventions of each target market.
Our Workflow
Given the volume, diversity, and sensitivity of the content involved, our team developed a structured seven-stage workflow that ensured quality was embedded at every step, from the moment files were received to the moment feedback was incorporated. Each stage was designed to minimise risk, maximise consistency, and create a reliable, repeatable delivery process that could scale across 13 languages simultaneously.
| 1 | Project Receipt & Content Analysis | Upon receiving project files from Temu, our project management team conducted a thorough analysis of all source materials, file formats, word counts per language, and content complexity. Product listings and legal pages were categorised separately and assigned to dedicated teams with the relevant domain expertise. Language-specific priorities were established based on market launch timelines. |
| 2 | Instruction & Glossary Briefing | Before translation began, all assigned linguists received a comprehensive briefing covering Temu’s brand voice, tone guidelines, platform-specific terminology, and any approved glossaries provided by the client. For legal pages, additional guidance on jurisdiction-specific conventions was issued. This pre-translation alignment step was fundamental to achieving consistency at the outset, rather than correcting inconsistencies after the fact. |
| 3 | Translation by Native-Speaking Specialists | Translation was performed by qualified, native-speaking translators selected for each language pair. For consumer-facing product content, translators with e-commerce and retail experience were prioritised. For legal pages, linguists with legal translation backgrounds were assigned. This domain-matching approach ensured that the nuance and register of each content type was handled appropriately from the first pass. |
| 4 | Editing | Each translated batch was reviewed by a separate, experienced editor who assessed accuracy against the source text, fluency and naturalness in the target language, consistency with approved glossaries and style guides, grammatical correctness, and appropriateness of tone for the target audience. Editors and translators worked independently, ensuring a genuine second-opinion review at this stage. |
| 5 | Proofreading | A proofreader performed a final linguistic review focused on typographical errors, punctuation, formatting consistency, and overall readability. This stage acted as the last human check before internal QA, catching any surface-level issues that may have survived the editing stage. |
| 6 | Internal QA Review | Our in-house QA team conducted a structured quality audit of all deliverables using established quality metrics aligned with industry standards. This included consistency checks across repeated terms and phrases, verification of glossary adherence, format checks, and a final review against Temu’s specific requirements. Nothing was delivered without passing this internal gate. |
| 7 | Delivery & Feedback Integration | Completed files were delivered to Temu on schedule and in the agreed formats. Client feedback, when provided, was treated as a structured input into the process, reviewed, categorised, and fed back to the relevant linguist teams as updated briefings and training material. This feedback loop was instrumental in the quality improvements achieved in Hebrew and Uzbek. |
Challenges & How We Overcame Them
Managing a project of this scale, 15 million words across 13 typologically diverse languages, covering both high-volume consumer content and compliance-critical legal documents, inevitably surfaced challenges at multiple levels. Below is a detailed account of the key challenges encountered and the specific measures taken to resolve them.
| Challenge | Our Approach & Resolution |
| Hebrew: Script Complexity & E-Commerce Nuance: Hebrew’s right-to-left script, combined with the fast-paced, colloquial register expected in e-commerce product listings, created initial quality inconsistencies. Formatting issues arose in product listing files, and terminology alignment with Temu’s approved glossary proved difficult in early batches. | Temu provided targeted feedback sessions that identified recurring error patterns in the Hebrew output. Our team used these insights to deliver focused training to the Hebrew linguists, refine the Hebrew-specific glossary entries, and introduce an additional editing checkpoint specifically for terminology compliance. Over successive delivery batches, quality scores improved substantially and stabilised at the required benchmark. |
| Uzbek: Under-Resourced Language & Register Variation: Uzbek is a less commonly resourced language in the professional translation industry, and finding consistent, high-quality terminology for both e-commerce and legal domains proved challenging. Early batches showed variation in register across linguists and inconsistencies in how certain product categories and legal concepts were rendered. | Working closely with Temu’s team, we developed a dedicated Uzbek glossary and style guide from the ground up, drawing on client feedback to establish approved terminology. A specialist reviewer with SaaS and e-commerce domain knowledge was brought in to support quality control for Uzbek, and linguist briefings were updated to mandate use of the new glossary. Subsequent batches showed marked improvement in consistency and register. |
| Maintaining Consistency Across 15M+ Words & 13 Languages: At this scale, with multiple linguists working in parallel across diverse language pairs, terminological drift and inconsistency are inherent risks — particularly given the dual content type of product listings (informal, persuasive) and legal pages (formal, precise). | We maintained language-specific glossaries and Translation Memories (TMs) throughout the engagement, ensuring previously approved translations were reused consistently across batches. Separate style guides were maintained for product and legal content in each language. Regular cross-batch consistency checks were built into the QA stage to proactively identify and resolve any drift before it compounded. |
| Legal Content Across Multiple Jurisdictions: Legal pages needed to comply with the conventions and expectations of diverse legal systems, from European civil law traditions (French, Slovenian, Danish, Maltese) to common law-adjacent approaches, Semitic legal language (Hebrew), and African legal contexts (Swahili, Zulu). A literal translation approach would not suffice. | For each legal language pair, we assigned linguists with demonstrable legal translation experience or legal domain knowledge. Where jurisdiction-specific conventions were unclear, the project team consulted subject-matter experts. Legal content was treated as a separate workstream with its own briefing documentation, distinct from the product listing translation guidelines. |
| Low-Resource Languages at Scale, Icelandic, Maltese, Sinhalese & Khmer: These languages present a limited pool of qualified professional translators globally. Sourcing consistent, high-quality linguists for sustained high-volume work, while maintaining the same quality standards as major European languages, was a resourcing challenge. | We invested additional time in vetting and onboarding linguists for these language pairs prior to the project commencing, establishing clear quality benchmarks during a trial phase. For Icelandic and Maltese, both with small native speaker populations, we worked with a network of highly specialised linguists and structured the workflow to allow more review time per word than higher-resource language pairs. |
Results & Outcomes
The engagement with Temu delivered measurable results across quality, delivery, and partnership dimensions. Through a combination of a rigorous multi-stage workflow, proactive challenge resolution, and genuine collaborative feedback cycles, the project met all key benchmarks, and the strength of the outcomes led directly to an expanded partnership.
| 15M+ Words Successfully Delivered Across 13 language pairs in TEP and Proofreading | 100% Quality Benchmarks Met All language pairs met Temu’s defined quality standards |
| 13 Languages Delivered On Time All project deadlines consistently honoured across all language pairs | 2 Languages Recovered via Training Hebrew & Uzbek brought to benchmark through feedback-driven improvement |
| Zero Unresolved Quality Issues All client feedback actioned and verified in subsequent batches | Expanded Partnership Scope Client continued and added new languages following successful delivery |
Broader Business Impact
High-quality, large-scale localisation at the speed and precision delivered in this engagement produces business outcomes that extend well beyond the translation itself. For a marketplace like Temu, operating in linguistically diverse global markets, the impact is felt across the entire customer journey:
- Improved Market Conversion: Product listings translated with market-appropriate language and consumer-facing persuasiveness directly contribute to higher conversion rates among local shoppers, compared to machine-translated or poorly localised alternatives.
- Regulatory Confidence in Legal Markets: Accurately localised legal pages (terms, privacy policies, and refund conditions) are a compliance requirement in many of Temu’s key markets. Precise legal translation reduces the risk of regulatory exposure and builds consumer trust.
- Scalable Localisation Infrastructure: The glossaries, translation memories, and style guides developed during this engagement provide Temu with a reusable linguistic asset base that reduces the cost and effort of all future translation work in these 13 languages.
- Consumer Trust Across Cultures: Shoppers are significantly more likely to trust and engage with a platform that speaks to them in their own language at a high standard. Quality localisation is a direct driver of brand credibility and customer retention in each market.
- Foundation for Language Expansion: The infrastructure and processes established across 13 languages created a proven, repeatable framework that enabled Temu to confidently expand the partnership to additional languages, knowing the quality and delivery model was already validated at scale.
Key Takeaways
- Structured Workflows Are Non-Negotiable at Scale: A clearly defined, multi-stage TEP process is the only reliable way to maintain quality when translating 15 million words across 13 languages simultaneously. Process discipline prevents quality from becoming a casualty of volume.
- Client Collaboration Is the Most Powerful Quality Lever: Temu’s willingness to provide specific, actionable feedback, and our team’s commitment to acting on it systematically, was the decisive factor in resolving quality challenges in Hebrew and Uzbek. Passive feedback loops produce incremental improvement; active collaboration produces transformation.
- Less-Resourced Languages Demand Proportionally More Investment: Language pairs like Uzbek, Maltese, Sinhalese, and Icelandic require proactive investment in linguist vetting, glossary development, and extended review time. Applying the same resource model as major European languages to these pairs is a quality risk that must be explicitly managed.
- Content Type Must Drive Team Selection: Product listings and legal pages are not the same kind of translation challenge. Matching linguist expertise to content domain — e-commerce specialists for listings, legal translators for compliance content, is a prerequisite for quality, not an optional refinement.
- Glossaries and Translation Memories Are Strategic Assets: The terminology infrastructure built during this engagement is a long-term business asset for Temu. Every future translation project in these languages starts from a position of consistency and institutional knowledge rather than from scratch.
- Trust Is Earned Through Delivery, Then Rewarded with Growth: Temu’s decision to continue the partnership and expand to additional languages was a direct result of consistent delivery, transparent communication, and demonstrated improvement under pressure. Long-term client relationships in translation are built one well-managed project at a time.