Translating and Localising Product Demos
August 19, 2026
If your product ships in several languages, your demo has a problem that a blog post does not: half the words are inside the screenshots, where no translation workflow can reach them.
How much work this is depends almost entirely on one decision you make before recording.
Two things need translating, and they are not equally easy
- The tooltips and captions you wrote. Genuinely easy -- text you control, translated like any other copy.
- The product interface inside each captured screen. Hard, because it is baked into the capture. Changing it means re-recording the whole demo with the product set to that language.
Decide whether the interface has to match
It does not always. A French-speaking buyer evaluating a tool whose interface is available in French mainly needs to know that, and a demo with English screens and French captions can be acceptable -- particularly for technical products where the audience works in English anyway.
Where it stops being acceptable is when the localisation IS the selling point. If you are selling to a market on the strength of speaking their language, showing them English screens undercuts the pitch at exactly the moment you are making it.
Right-to-left is not a translation problem
Arabic and Hebrew interfaces mirror the layout: navigation moves to the right, and so does everything the viewer expects to click. A demo recorded in a left-to-right interface with translated captions will point at the wrong side of the screen.
For RTL, re-record. There is no shortcut, and a mirrored demo with captions in the right language is more confusing than one entirely in English.
A workflow that keeps this manageable
- Write the script once, as a document, before recording anything. Step order and caption text, in a file. This is what gets translated, and it makes each additional language a re-recording rather than a redesign.
- Record the primary language first and get it right before duplicating the mistake into four others.
- Set up the demo account in each language before the recording session, so you are switching product locale rather than rebuilding data.
- Keep the demos separate, one per language, named accordingly. Trying to make one demo serve several languages produces something that serves none well.
Personalisation is not localisation
Text tokens that swap a name or company per viewer are a different feature and will not translate an interface. They are useful for a prospect's name in a caption; they cannot make a screenshot Arabic.
It is worth being clear about this internally, because the two get conflated and someone ends up promising a localised demo that is an English one with a French company name in it.
Frequently asked questions
- How do you translate an interactive demo?
- The captions and tooltips translate like any other copy. The product interface inside each captured screen does not -- it is baked into the capture, so a fully localised demo means re-recording with the product set to that language.
- Does the demo interface have to be in the viewer's language?
- Not always. English screens with translated captions can work for technical audiences. It stops working when localisation is itself the selling point, because showing English screens undercuts that pitch exactly when you are making it.
- What about Arabic or Hebrew demos?
- Re-record them. Right-to-left interfaces mirror the layout, so navigation and buttons move to the opposite side, and a demo recorded left-to-right will point at the wrong place regardless of what language the captions are in.
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