Spent the summer and early autumn working with native speakers for each of the eleven target languages, rewriting customer-facing copy from scratch rather than running it through translation memory. The Eastern European languages got the most attention — Czech, Slovak, Polish, Hungarian — because that's where the existing app market was weakest and where our pilot store (jmbonline.cz + jmbonline.sk) was running real customer flows every day.

What changed in the rewrite:

• Grammatical case handled per email template. Greetings, tier names, reward messages — all decline correctly instead of defaulting to nominative form.
• Currency and number formatting follows local convention. Czech and Polish use spaces as thousand separators; we got that right.
• Tier names can be localized per market, not just translated. A brand running a Czech-language storefront can name their gold tier "Zlatý" — the system handles the agreement automatically.

This is where the "native, not translated" claim originated. It's harder to do, and most apps don't bother. We thought a Czech customer would notice — and based on follow-up with the pilot merchants, they did.