About the studio · Mclean, VA

We’re not a translation vendor — we’re the lamp you carry into your UI before launch day.

You’ve built something sharp. Now you’re ready to put it in front of Madrid, São Paulo and Lyon. Lantern Yard is the small studio that makes sure it lands the way you meant it, with native reviewers who actually tap through your build.

Who we work beside
  • B2B SaaS product teams
  • Medtech regulatory affairs
  • Help-center owners
Illustration of the Lantern Yard workroom with a brass lantern lighting a desk of screens and printed manuals

01 Why the Yard exists

Every product team has shipped a button that sounded wrong.

It usually starts the same way. A strong product, a launch date, and a spreadsheet of strings sent off to be translated by whoever quoted by the word. Back comes Spanish that is technically correct and sounds like a tax form. Nobody notices until a customer in Mexico City does.

Lantern Yard was set up in Mclean to close that gap. One translator drafts against your glossary. A second linguist, living in the market you’re selling to, reviews it inside your running build, not in a spreadsheet, and sends back annotated screenshots of anything that truncates, misgenders or reads cold.

We only work in three languages, Spanish, Portuguese and French, and only for software and medtech. That narrow focus is the whole point: we know why “dose” can’t drift between screen 4 and page 12 of an IFU, and why French needs room to breathe on a mobile button.

Why a fixed fee, specifically

You need a budget line to hand your finance lead, not an hourly clock you watch. So we scope your files first, name one number, and hold it. If the scope changes we tell you before work starts, never after.

02 How we hold ourselves

Four promises, stamped.

Your market, your variant

Spain or Latin America. Brazil or Portugal. France or Canada. You pick the variant, and your translator and reviewer live in it. No “neutral” Spanish that belongs nowhere.

Two linguists, never one

Whoever drafts never signs off on their own work. A second native reads it fresh, then uses your product the way your customer will.

We work in your files

JSON, XLIFF, PO, .strings, ARB, RESX. You won’t be asked to reformat anything or paste strings into our portal. Files go out the way they came in.

You keep the termbase

Every project ends with the glossary we built, delivered with the files, so your next release starts ahead and your next vendor can’t reinvent your vocabulary.

03 What working with us feels like

From first email to shipped strings, week by week.

Day 1

Send the file, get the number

You email your strings or a description of the job. Within one business day you have a fixed fee, a timeline and a list of anything we still need.

Kickoff

Half down, glossary built

Half the fee at kickoff. We pull your glossary and do-not-translate list, run pseudo-localization, and flag strings likely to overflow before a word is translated.

Weeks 1–3

Draft, review, play through

Draft and independent review run in parallel across your languages. Then the in-market reviewer walks your staging build or device and marks what they find.

Delivery

Files back, balance due, termbase yours

Final files in your formats, annotated QA screenshots, one revision round, and the termbase. Second half is due on delivery.

04 Your move

Your next release can sound local on day one.

Send us the file, or just describe the job. We’ll answer with a fixed fee and a timeline, usually the next business day.

05 Find the Yard

Pull up a chair in Mclean.

The Yard

801 Ridge Dr
Mclean, VA 22101
Plot the route to the Yard →

Hours

Weekdays 10am–5:30pm Emails sent after hours get answered first thing.

Reach us

(703) 472-5220 studio@lanternyardofficial.com
Call us Get a quote