About the studio · Big Rapids, MI

You Want a Team That Reads Your Product Like a Customer Does. Meet It.

Lantern Yard is a small localization studio in Big Rapids, Michigan. We turn software into Spanish, Portuguese and French that sounds native, and we check every line on your real screens before it ships.

Bring Us Your Strings Read the House Rules
A lit lantern on a studio desk beside a laptop and marked-up printed string files

Stop 01 · The Story

Small Studio, Long Nights, Clean Launches

Why a yard?

A Lantern Is What You Carry Into the Dark Part

Entering a new market feels like walking into an unlit yard. You don’t know where the curbs are. We exist to hold the light while you cross: one language, one linguist, one glossary at a time.

Lantern Yard started with a plain frustration: software teams were handing off string files and getting back translations that were technically correct and practically unusable. Buttons overflowed. “Save” became a verb that meant something else. Support tickets came in from the very users the translation was meant to serve.

So we built the studio around the fix. A native speaker translates, a second pass clicks through your staging build screen by screen, and the decisions land in a glossary and style guide you keep. You pay one flat fee per language, so nobody is watching a meter while the work gets good.

We’re based at 13692 Northland Dr in Big Rapids. Your files travel; the work gets done here, and you can call the studio line and reach someone who reads .json and .po files for a living.

Ready to Hear Your Product in Another Voice?

Send one file and get a free 300-word test translation back in two business days. Take the first step today.

Send Your Sample File

Stop 02 · The House Rules

Five Rules We Don’t Bend

  1. 01

    Natives write it

    Every string and every help-center sentence is translated by a native speaker of the target language. Machine drafts never ship as final copy.

  2. 02

    Glossary before words

    We lock your product terms first, so “Dashboard” is the same word on day one and in the last article.

  3. 03

    Check it on the screen

    Translation isn’t done until it’s been clicked through in your staging build. Truncated labels and wrong-button wording get logged and fixed.

  4. 04

    Write for the region

    Brazilian Portuguese, French for France, Latin American Spanish by default. European Portuguese, Canadian French or Castilian Spanish on request, at the same price.

  5. 05

    Quote the number first

    One flat fee per language. Anything beyond the word allowance is quoted in writing before we touch it.

A row of lanterns lighting a path through a courtyard at dusk

Stop 03 · The Craft Bench

What We Put On the Bench With Your Files

A good localization is mostly invisible. Nobody in Lyon notices that your onboarding screen reads naturally; they just finish it. Getting there takes unglamorous habits: reading ICU plurals aloud, testing long German-length words against short buttons, and asking you what “workspace” means to your users before choosing a word for it.

You’ll deal with the same small team from kickoff to merge. They’ll ask good questions early, because a ten-minute question on day one saves a rewrite on day nine.

See What It Costs

On Every Project

  • LinguistOne native speaker per language
  • GlossaryLocked before translation starts
  • QAScreen by screen in your staging build
  • TimelineTen business days, kickoff to files
  • LanguagesEspañol · Português · Français
  • HoursMon–Fri 8am–4:30pm

Talk to the People Who’ll Do the Work.

Call the studio Mon–Fri 8am–4:30pm. Tell us your product, your languages and your launch date.

Call (517) 763-1080