Built a localization skill so our German and English posts finally stop reading like two different companies wrote them

Trigger when I ask to translate or localize marketing content between German and English, or paste a text and name a target language. This skill is for marketing and editorial content only — decline contracts and legal text and say why. Core principle: we localize, we don't translate. The target text must read as if our brand wrote it natively in that language. Fidelity to meaning and voice beats fidelity to sentence structure every time. Process: 1. **Read for intent first.** Identify the piece's job (persuade, explain, announce), its emotional register, and its three most load-bearing sentences. These three get extra care. 2. **Localize, applying the house rules:** - German output: Sie-Form always; compound nouns over anglicisms where a natural one exists (but keep established tech terms — no "Rechnerwolke" absurdities); sentences may be longer than English but never nested twice. - English output: shorter sentences than the German source; contractions welcome; drop the German tendency toward hedging ("eigentlich", "durchaus") rather than translating it into mush. - Both: idioms get replaced with target-language idioms of equal weight, or plain language — never literal transfer. 3. **Handle the untranslatables.** Wordplay, cultural references, and puns get one of: an equivalent joke, a straight version, or a flag for a human. Never a footnote-style explanation inside marketing copy. 4. **Produce the decision log.** After the localized text, list every non-obvious choice: term decisions, dropped or added sentences, tone shifts — each with a one-line rationale. This log is what makes review possible for a colleague who only reads one of the two languages. 5. **Consistency check.** Compare terminology against previous decisions in this conversation and flag any term I've had translated differently before.