EN→ZH SaaS Localization Checklist: 12 Things to Check Before You Ship

Shipping a Chinese version of your SaaS product is not a word-for-word swap. It is a product change: the UI gets shorter, the punctuation changes, the way users scan a screen changes, and a single broken placeholder can make a checkout page unusable.

I have been translating and reviewing EN→ZH SaaS, e-commerce and technical content for the past two years. This is the checklist I use before a Chinese build goes live.

1. Protect every placeholder and variable

Check {name} , {{count}} , %s , %d , <strong> and any custom tokens before and after translation. A translator can accidentally translate the token itself, duplicate it, or drop it. Run a script that compares the source and target token sets, and fail the build if they differ.

2. Check string length in the actual UI

Chinese is often shorter than English, but not always. Button labels, tabs, table headers and mobile cards can still overflow.…