Tomedes Localizes Decathlon’s Product and Legal Documentation for a New Market

Terminology inconsistency across a large retail catalog

Terminology inconsistency is a familiar problem across the industry. When different translators handle different batches of a catalog without a shared reference, each one makes independent decisions about how to render established technical terms, and over time those decisions diverge.

The result is a catalog where the same concept appears under different names across product listings, in-store signage, and online descriptions. Customers comparing products encounter different terms for the same feature depending on which document they read.

For a retailer with a wide, constantly updating product range across dozens of sport categories, this risk is structural. Tomedes' project data shows that retail clients without a shared terminology reference generate meaningfully more revision requests across their programs than clients who establish one from the start.

Legal documents translated without local-market context

When retail legal documents are translated without local legal context, the output can be linguistically accurate but mismatched to the requirements and conventions of the target market. This can affect regulatory compliance and the drafting of warranty and purchase terms. A retail localization program therefore needs to cover adaptation of agreements, regulatory requirements, and purchasing and product warranty terms, with familiarity in the destination market's commercial-law conventions.

Design and prepress for local writing direction and layout

Design and prepress are as important as the translation itself. When packaging and marketing materials designed in English are localized for a right-to-left language such as Hebrew, the layout has to be rebuilt for RTL text flow, with fonts that render the target script correctly and image-text relationships reversed while keeping product imagery faithful to the original.

Text length also tends to differ between source and target languages. Layout adjustments are needed to produce a visually consistent document, not just a translated one. Where the direction stays left-to-right, the same category of issues (character rendering for extended scripts, length changes, prepress) still applies, just at a different scale.

A terminology database established before translation began

Tomedes and Decathlon Israel built the shared terminology database before the translation workflow started. It covers the local-language equivalents for the technical and preferred terms appearing across the product catalog.

Every translator working on the client's content applies this reference. When a new product batch arrives, translators work from the approved vocabulary instead of making independent decisions about established terms. Terminology consistency is maintained across product signage, packaging, and online product descriptions.

A monthly program structure that matches the retailer's operational pace

The program runs on a monthly billing cycle with a dedicated account structure that matches the pace of product intake and preparation for marketing in the target market. New content enters the workflow routed to its content type, and is returned on the timeline each type requires.