Service · Japanese localization

Your web app in Japanese, delivered as a pull request

We translate your UI into natural Japanese and set up i18n if you don't have it yet (Next.js, React, Vue). You review and merge one pull request. Fixed price, a free sample first, and you pay after delivery.

What you get with Complete

• Your UI text in Japanese, as a new ja locale in the files you already use (JSON, YAML, PO, TS).
• If your app has no i18n yet: strings moved into locale files, a language switch, and <html lang="ja"> on Japanese pages.
• Japanese page titles, descriptions and social preview text — what Google and X show people in Japan.
• We run your app and check every screen in Japanese, at phone and desktop width, in Chrome and in WebKit (the engine behind Safari). That includes search, which often finds nothing in Japanese (why), previews and counters that cut Japanese short (why), lists sorted in the wrong order (why), email subjects that arrive garbled (why), CSV files that open garbled in Excel (why), Japanese titles that give an empty URL slug (why), file names garbled on upload and download (why), dates in the Japanese era that come out wrong (why), full-width spaces that get past your checks (why), public holidays your app gets wrong (why), and vertical text that comes out sideways or upside down (why).
• As many rounds of fixes as you need for 30 days, and the first month of new strings translated.

What a quick machine translation misses

• Enter while typing Japanese. Japanese is typed through an input method, and people press Enter to confirm the kanji. A chat box or form that sends on Enter without checking for this sends half a word. Safari reports these key presses differently from Chrome. We test it, and fix it in the same pull request (how to fix it yourself).
• The right glyphs. Without lang="ja", browsers can draw some kanji in their Chinese shapes. We set the language and a Japanese font stack (Hiragino on Apple devices, Yu Gothic or Meiryo on Windows, Noto Sans JP elsewhere) without loading a heavy web font (how to fix it yourself). In the PDFs your app makes, we embed a Japanese font with its bold (how to fix it yourself).
• Line breaks. Japanese has no spaces, so a long heading can break in the middle of a word. We keep headings whole with word-break: auto-phrase where browsers support it, and with <wbr> where they don't (how to fix it yourself).
• Forms Japanese people fill in. Full-width digits in phone numbers and postal codes (how to accept them), phone numbers converted to +81 without the 0 (the fix), addresses in the Japanese order, filled in from the postal code (the fix), family name first, dates with the year first (the fix), and yen without decimals. If you take payments in JPY, Stripe counts yen in whole yen, not cents — an amount multiplied by 100 charges 100 times too much (the fix).
• Tone. One polite register across the whole app, and the words Japanese apps actually use on buttons, not literal translations.

Twenty of these, each with a test you can run yourself: the Japanese localization checklist. Send us your app's URL and we'll check it against the list for free.

What our work looks like: fixes we sent to open-source apps, how we checked each one, and a sample of the free check.

Merged so far: pandas_market_calendars #514, which adds the 14 Japanese public holidays its Tokyo Stock Exchange calendar was missing before 1997.

Price

Translate — $99

• Your existing locale files translated (up to 2,000 words)
• Delivered as translated files, or a pull request
• One round of fixes
• We don't run your app or change your code

Recommended

Complete — $249

• Up to 3,000 words, with i18n set up if you don't have it
• Delivered as a pull request
• We run your app and check every screen in Chrome and WebKit, at phone and desktop width
• Japanese input, fonts, line breaks, forms, dates and yen fixed in the same pull request
• Japanese titles, descriptions and social previews
• As many rounds of fixes as you need for 30 days
• First month of Keep it in Japanese included

Launch in Japan — $1,490

• Everything in Complete
• Every string reviewed by a native Japanese proofreader
• Your landing page rewritten for Japanese readers (up to 1,500 words), the text in your screenshots, your app store text if you have a mobile app, and the words people in Japan search for
• A launch kit: drafts of introduction articles for Qiita, Zenn and note, five posts for X, and a list of Japanese sites where you can submit your app
• For three months, the emails and reviews you get in Japanese translated, with draft replies (up to 30 a month)
• 12 months of Keep it in Japanese included
• Your requests go first

Translate and Complete are launch prices for our first five projects. Launch in Japan is paid half when we start and half after delivery, and usually takes ten business days. Bigger app? Write to us for a fixed quote before we start.

Keep it in Japanese: $29 a month. When you ship new strings, we translate them in a pull request within two business days (up to 500 words a month). Cancel any time.

How it works

1. Write to support@lesstep.com with your app's URL, and the repository if your code is on GitHub.
2. Within two business days, a free sample: your landing page's main heading and buttons in Japanese, with screenshots. No payment details needed.
3. If you like it, we deliver the whole app as a pull request, usually within five business days.
4. You review it and we fix what you find. Then we send you a card payment link. You pay after delivery.

Who does the work

Lesstep is a small developer-tools maker in Japan; we also make IDE plugins on JetBrains Marketplace. We translate with AI, then read every string on its screen and check every screen in Japanese. In Translate and Complete, no human translator reviews every line — the free sample is there so you can judge before you pay. In Launch in Japan, a native Japanese proofreader does.

Questions

• Do you need my code? Not for the sample. For the full job: public repositories we fork; for a private one, add us as a collaborator for the job, or send us the locale files and we send them back translated.
• Which i18n libraries? next-intl, next-i18next, react-i18next, i18next, vue-i18n, Nuxt i18n and Paraglide. If yours isn't listed, ask.
• Mobile apps? Web apps only for now.
• What happens to my code? It is used only for your job, by us and by the AI model we translate with. We delete our copy 30 days after delivery.

Seller information: commerce disclosure.