Market briefing
Locale Lab Atlas · October 2, 2026
Portfolio · en-US · profile · BALANCED
Decision requested
Approve $10,350 and one quarter for a Simplified Chinese launch (UI at publication quality depth).
Recommendation: launch Simplified Chinese next, anchored on China.
Localizing into Simplified Chinese adds roughly 1.3B speakers the current portfolio does not reach (16.0% of world population) at medium engineering effort. Composite score 93/100 under the BALANCED weighting, 19 points clear of the runner-up (Hindi).
Simplified Chinese ranks #1 under all 4 weighting profiles.
Net-new reach
1.3B
speakers not covered today · ~1.2B online · 16.0% of world population · score 100/100
Anchor market
China
pop. 1.4B · ~1.3B online · $13,862/capita · GDP score 100/100
Execution
Medium effort
new script (CJK) · LTR · 1 plural category · webfont · ease score 78/100
What shipping Simplified Chinese takes · day one
- Writing systemCJK (new to the portfolio)
- Layout directionLeft-to-right, no mirroring
- Plural arms per counted string1
- Custom webfontRequired, budget subsetting
Risks & watchouts
- New writing system (CJK): font stack, vertical metrics, and truncation rules have no coverage today.
- Needs a bundled webfont: adds load-time weight in exactly the markets where connectivity is weakest. Subset aggressively.
Proposed sequence
Now · Q1 2027
Simplified Chinese
China · score 93/100 · 1.3B net-new speakers at this step
Next · Q2 2027
Hindi
India · score 74/100 · 581.4M net-new speakers at this step
Later · Q3 2027
Portuguese
Brazil · score 70/100 · 247.1M net-new speakers at this step
Step counts assume the earlier steps have shipped, so the numbers can be summed without double-counting overlapping languages.
Alternatives considered
- Hindi (India): 74 vs 93. LTR layout · Needs custom webfont
- Portuguese (Brazil): 70 vs 93. Script already supported · LTR layout
What this model does not include
Revenue or ARPU by market, English-proficiency substitution (high-proficiency markets tolerate an English product longer), competitor coverage, regulatory requirements, and content depth beyond UI strings. Scores rank candidates; they do not forecast outcomes. Bring your own revenue data to fill that gap, or load per-market usage under Atlas → Your Data to add a demand signal.
Appendix · cost estimate
Depth: UI at publication quality · Ships UI strings edited to publication quality with one round of LQA (a human quality-review pass). Docs and support stay in the source language.
| Language | Rate | Translation | Review | Total | Days |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Simplified Chinese zh-CN · recommended | $0.08/word | $1,920 | $384 | $2,650 | 5.7 |
| Hindi hi-IN | $0.08/word | $1,600 | $320 | $2,208 | 5.7 |
| Portuguese pt-BR | $0.08/word | $1,600 | $320 | $2,208 | 5.7 |
| All 3 markets | $5,120 | $1,024 | $7,066 | 5.7 |
One-time engineering setup · Simplified Chinese
| i18n framework | $6,000 | Externalize strings, wire ICU, add a pseudoloc CI gate, TMS hookup. |
| Webfonts (1 script) | $1,200 | Subset + glyph QA for: CJK. |
| Per-locale integration (1) | $500 | Locale file wiring and an in-context sign-off pass per locale. |
| Setup total | $7,700 | Planning figures. Capabilities the portfolio already ships are not re-charged. |
The budget ask quotes the Simplified Chinese row plus the one-time setup ($10,350 together). The totals row prices all 3 markets of the proposed sequence, translation only, worked in parallel.
Ongoing upkeep (assumption): ~$1,060/year per market, with 40% of the source words retranslated each year at the same depth rates, LQA rounds, and PM overhead. Replace the churn rate with your own.
- Per-word rates and throughput are industry-typical 2025 defaults, not a vendor quote.
- The estimate prices each locale with a per-language-pair rate index (Japanese, Nordic, and RTL pairs run above a mainstream pair). The index is a planning figure without a sourced rate behind it.
- The model assumes no translation-memory leverage: a first launch has no memory, so it prices every word as new.
- Engineering setup (RTL enablement, webfonts, i18n framework) is a separate one-time cost, priced in the budget estimator.
- This depth prices ui at "MT + full post-edit" with 1 LQA round and 15% PM overhead.
Appendix · sources
- CLDR territory & language data · Unicode Consortium · cldr-json main branch (latest published CLDR).
- Internet users (% of population) · World Bank Open Data · Most recent reported year per country (varies by country, year stored per record).
- GDP per capita (current US$) · World Bank Open Data · Most recent reported year per country (varies by country).
- Account ownership (% age 15+) · World Bank Global Findex · Most recent survey wave per country (the Findex runs every ~3 years, wave year stored per record).
- Translation per-word rates & throughput · Curated (industry-typical defaults) · 2025 defaults, every figure editable in the UI.
Full methodology: locale-lab · /atlas/methodology
Methodology. Composite = 34% incremental reach (net-new speakers under a capped-share overlap model, 200M ≈ 100) + 33% market GDP (normalized to the top market) + 33% engineering ease (script overlap, direction, plural complexity, font need). Data: Unicode CLDR territoryInfo (population, GDP, language shares, L1+L2, so totals double-count multilinguals) joined with World Bank Open Data (internet penetration, GDP per capita). The online-reach figure assumes language share is uniform across a country's online population. Markets with no internet data count as zero online.