The studio · Brooklyn, NY
Plainspoke is a small Brooklyn studio devoted to the unglamorous half of a product: the error message, the dosing line, the toggle in settings. We localize it into Spanish, Portuguese and Haitian Creole, and we do not call it finished until someone has said it out loud.
Why we exist
A short account of the studio, written by the people who answer the phone.
“Software gets translated at the end, by whoever has an hour. We wanted to be the people who have the hour.”
Plainspoke began with a small, irritating observation: the companies that built careful products often shipped their Spanish, Portuguese and Creole versions as an afterthought. A button clipped in half. A dosing instruction that read like a legal notice. A phrase that was correct in a dictionary and strange in a kitchen.
So we built a studio around the afterthought. Interface strings, help-center articles and patient-facing instructions are our whole catalogue. We keep it narrow on purpose, because a narrow practice lets us learn your product’s vocabulary once and hold it steady across every release.
Our method is old-fashioned. One translator drafts. A second native speaker, who has not seen the draft being made, reads it aloud and marks every line that makes them hesitate. Then we walk your actual build on a device, because a sentence that fits in a spreadsheet can still break a screen.
Haitian Creole is part of the work from the first day, not a line item added on request. It is routinely absent from vendor menus, and the people it leaves out are often the ones reading the instructions most closely.
The Plainspoke desk, Lefferts Place
Our one stubborn habit
Reading aloud catches what proofreading skims: the stacked clause, the borrowed word that sounds borrowed, the verb a grandmother would never use. It adds an hour to a project. It has never once been the hour we regretted.
Send us a sample to readHouse rules
They are not slogans. Each one changes what lands in your inbox.
We ask for your term list on day one. If you don’t have one, we write it with you, and you keep it, whether or not you hire us again.
The native speaker who reviews never drafted the line. Fresh ears hear what the author’s no longer can.
Placeholders, plural rules, IDs and links come back untouched. Engineers should be able to merge our files without a meeting.
Brand names, legal boilerplate and anything your counsel owns get marked, not guessed at.
Medical content comes back with a query log for your regulatory team. Their sign-off stays theirs; ours is a careful read, not a stamp of approval.
On the desk
What each language asks of us, and what we do about it.
Spanish tends to run longer than its English source, so we test every button and tab on a real screen. Latin American Spanish is our default; Spain Spanish is available at the same rate.
We write for Brazilian readers by default and watch for false friends, like the “tablete” that turns out to be a chocolate bar. European Portuguese is available on request.
Short verbs, plain sentences, and no French register smuggled in. Our reviewers are fluent Kreyòl speakers who read each line aloud before it ships.
Come by
We work from 88 Lefferts Pl, Apt 3A, Monday to Thursday from 9am to 5:30pm and Fridays until 1pm. Visits are by appointment, which mostly means a pot of coffee and a proof spread across the table.
Not local? Most of our projects never involve a visit at all. Files arrive by email, quotes go back within two business days, and the first call is on us.