Language Specialist, German

Company Description

Shopify is a leading global commerce company, providing trusted tools to start, grow, market, and manage a retail business of any size. Shopify makes commerce better for everyone with a platform and services that are engineered for reliability, while delivering a better shopping experience for consumers everywhere. Shopify powers millions of businesses in more than 175 countries and is trusted by brands such as Allbirds, Gymshark, PepsiCo, Staples, and many more.

**Job Description**:
Shopify is a leading commerce-enablement platform with ambitions to grow our brand globally, requiring multilingual content efforts that can support this effort at scale. As a Language Specialist, you will work with our localization program managers and intl. content managers on projects spanning multiple product, channel and content verticals. You will be responsible for all linguistic aspects, elements and decisions for German in collaboration with the German content manager.

International content and localization efforts at Shopify are centred around linguistic excellence, teamwork, and cutting-edge technology. We are responsible for the translation and cultural adaptation of a broad catalogue of customer facing content, from performance-based marketing collateral to original training programs and international brand awareness campaigns. We operate with the mandate that hyper local content, innovative marketing campaigns, relevant product communications, and press releases that appear in the biggest media outlets around the world are the mediums through which we can grow the Shopify business at scale globally. Our work is not just about translation and localization; it is about providing our users with an experience that feels locally and topically relevant and fuels international growth with an ever expanding base of empowered partners and merchants.

As a Language Specialist, you will work under the guidance of the Localization Programs Lead & your Team Lead, as well as in collaboration with Localization Program Managers, Content Managers, the Vendor Manager and our external vendors to ensure that our content in German represents the Shopify brand perfectly in Germany.

**Responsibilities**:
**Language Quality**
- Act as the center of excellence for your language quality, voice, style, tone and brand localization & internationalization.
- Coordinate the creation (if needed) and maintenance of linguistic assets (term bases, style guides, translation memories, reference material) for German/Germany, and in collaboration with the LPMs and the terminologist on our team.
- Work with the rest of the growth marketing localization team, the in-country team, the integrated and growth marketers and other stakeholders to develop a Shopify brand in German that resonates with Shopify's overarching brand in English, while feeling local in the target market (Germany and DACH region).
- Conduct quality assurance for all localized content and product to ensure consistent messaging and proper functionality.
- Conduct staging review in context (this includes our homepage, various landing pages, paid ads in text or multimedia form on platforms such as Celtra, and other types of assets).
- Report issues to our Language Service Provider/s and/or fix issues.
- On occasion, translate/localize/transcreate Shopify's website in German.
- Ensure all website content is on brand in terms of style, quality, tone and terminology.
- Work with the SEO team to ensure that website content is optimized for SEO to maximize performance. Approve keywords.

**Relationship Building**
- Develop and maintain key relationships with external vendors and in collaboration with our Localization Vendor Manager.
- Assist with the onboarding of external vendors, regularly communicate with them to align and calibrate language, style and terminology, and maintain strong working relationships.
- Train and coach linguists, if and when needed.
- Clarify quality expectations and maintain/optimize quality control processes.
- Develop and maintain key relationships with internal Shopify teams.
- Work with various Shopify departments/groups to gather context on initiatives, events, new features & product changes that will need to be translated, in collaboration with our Global Enablement Manager and her team.

**Vendor Management**
- Answer daily/weekly linguistic queries from vendors.
- Monitor translation feedback from merchants, partners and internal employees.
- Act as our vendor's escalation point of contact for translation feedback. The vendor in conjunction with the language specialist would be responsible for fixing the feedback reported.
- Liaise with developers, designers and content strategists to fix reported non-linguistic issues in collaboration with the Localization Program Managers.

**Qualifications**:

- Native language skills in German.
- Fluent verbal and written English, ability to write clearly and concisely in both your mother-tongue and