Alessio Di Rubbo

Italian translation and localization for brands and agencies

Service · Page published October 5, 2026 · Updated October 20, 2026

I translate and localize content into Italian for brands and agencies selling to Italy, from the DACH region and beyond: shop and product pages, websites, campaigns, newsletters and interfaces. I work from German and English, into Italian only, and every engagement ends with pages ready to publish plus a glossary and a style guide that hold your brand voice steady through later releases. Certified translations of official documents are not part of the service.

Who it is for

The service is for people who already have an Italian audience and an Italian text they are not confident about.

  • Marketing and e-commerce leads at brands entering or growing in Italy, who need Italian that sells rather than Italian that is merely correct.
  • Brands with an Italian site that was translated once and never looked at again, where every release has added one more terminology variant.
  • Translation, SEO and marketing agencies looking for a reliable Italian specialist for client projects, white-label included.

The typical case is not a wrong text. It is a correct text that reads as translated, and so loses the reader's trust at the exact point where you are asking for it.

What you receive

Every engagement ends with three things, not with a translation file.

  • Localized Italian content, ready to publish or delivered in your CAT tool or TMS, in the format your team works with.
  • Italian glossary and style guide: key terms with one approved rendering each, variants to avoid, register, brand voice.
  • Notes on the decisions that are yours: claims that cannot be made in Italy the way they are made in Germany, price and measurement conventions, points where the choice is a marketing one rather than a linguistic one.

The glossary is the part that keeps working after handover. Without it, the third person to touch the site reintroduces the variants we had just removed.

How I work

Four steps, in the same order on every project.

Briefing. Audience, tone, existing material and keyword priorities. If you already have a German or English style guide, I adapt it rather than start from scratch: the brand decisions already made stay, what changes is how they are carried into Italian.

Glossary and register. Key terms and the tu/Lei decision are fixed before the first page. This is the step companies skip most often, and it is the one that produces sites where the cart becomes the basket between one screen and the next.

Localization. I write for people reading in Italian, not sentence by sentence along the source. Where a claim, a unit or a convention does not work in Italy, I flag it instead of translating it anyway.

Review and handover. A second pass against source and glossary, then delivery in the format you use. Problems that originate upstream, in the source, I list separately.

What I need from you

Three things, and none of them requires preparation.

  • The source texts in whatever format you already have, untidy is fine.
  • Someone who can answer questions on substance, usually whoever owns the product or marketing for Italy.
  • The brand decisions I cannot make: register, product names that should not be translated, claims that need legal sign-off.

If a style guide or a glossary already exists, in any language, it is the best starting point you can give me.

Scope and timing

Timing and price are agreed per project, based on volume, format and deadline. I do not work at a fixed per-word rate on projects that include a glossary and a style guide, because the part that carries the most value is not measured in words.

A small project, a few pages with glossary and style guide included, starts from about €950 (excl. VAT) and usually closes within one working week. A full e-commerce site needs several passes and a phased plan, agreed before we start.

What I do not do

I work into Italian only. I do not translate into German or English and I do not take on other target languages: on a multilingual project I am glad to coordinate with colleagues covering the other languages, but my part stays Italian.

I do not provide certified or sworn translations of certificates, contracts or other documents for public authorities. For those you need a sworn translator.

I do not handle site-wide technical SEO, meaning indexing, site speed and server setup. The language-related technical checks, such as hreflang, Italian slugs and metadata, belong to Italian SEO and GEO instead.

Frequently asked questions

Are you a translation agency?

In the sense that matters when you hire one, yes: you get translation, review and terminology from one source. The difference is in how the work is organized. One person works on your project from the first page to the glossary, instead of a rotating pool of translators. Certified translations are the one thing I do not provide.

Can I send only part of the site to start?

Yes, and it is the most sensible way to begin. One page or one category is enough to see how I work and to tell whether the problems are systematic. That is what the free review is for.

Do you work with machine translation?

Yes, where it makes sense. On large, repetitive catalogues, machine translation with full post-editing is the right call and I say so openly. On homepages, campaigns and checkout copy it is not: there the margin for error costs more than the machine saves.

Does the glossary stay mine?

Yes. Glossary, style guide and translation memories are yours, handed over in an open format that anyone working on your texts after me can use.

Do you work white-label for agencies?

Yes. I work inside your processes and your tools, deliver to your project managers, and do not contact your clients unless you ask me to.

How is this different from a language review?

Localization produces the Italian text. An independent review checks Italian that already exists, written by someone else or by a machine, and documents it with findings by severity. If you already have a delivery in hand and want to know whether it holds up, the right service is Italian Linguistic QA.

Why not just correct the text with a free AI tool?

For typos and agreement it works, and there is no point paying someone for that. The problems that cost you on a localized page are elsewhere: a correct term that nobody searches for, a calque that reads as translated without being wrong. A general-purpose AI sometimes spots them if you ask the right question, but it proposes right and wrong corrections with the same confidence, and telling them apart takes someone who knows Italian and the market. It does not know your glossary or the register you chose either: from one request to the next it can suggest two renderings of the same term, which is exactly the problem a glossary exists to prevent.

Send me one Italian page and I will tell you what a native reader notices. Book a free review.