Make your product work in Japan.
Not just translated — truly usable, trusted, adopted.
What We Do
We help SaaS and global product teams shape the Japanese experience across onboarding, help, UX writing, and adoption messaging. From fixing AI drafts to refining key flows, we become your native Japanese brain, bridging product design and language.
Localization ≠ Adoption
Just translating the UI into Japanese doesn’t mean people will use it. Users hesitate when the tone feels off, onboarding feels risky, or key messages don’t land. This isn’t about culture — it’s about the language layer of the UX: tone, clarity, predictability, trust, and risk perception.
AI made “translation” the easy part. But it didn’t fix the experience that language creates. And in Japan, trust is especially fragile. Sometimes it’s the fear of getting something wrong; often English simply feels like effort. When something is unclear or annoying, people don’t push through. They quietly give up — and adoption stalls.
That’s why we don’t just localize. We help you design the Japanese experience your product deserves.
Why IC Eight Exists
The old localization model — vendors, handoffs, TEP cycles — was built for a pre-AI world. Today, AI handles most of the language work. Companies can internalize 70–80% of what used to require large vendor pipelines.
What remains — and what actually drives adoption — is Language-driven UX design.
This is the part that shapes clarity, predictability, trust, and how “safe” a product feels to use in Japanese.
That’s the layer AI can’t fully solve.
And it’s the layer we specialize in.
How We Can Help
Whether you’re just starting localization or already working with AI-generated Japanese, we help you move forward — without overcommitting or getting stuck.
- Just starting out?
We’ll help identify what you really need and where to begin. - Already have an AI-generated version?
We’ll review, flag what breaks trust, and rewrite what matters. - Planning to use AI for Japanese?
We’ll help you decide what’s safe to automate and what’s not. - Need advice, not just words?
We draw on decades of localization work to guide your rollout and build trust.
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Articles
Thought pieces, analyses, and notes on the future of Japanese localization — written for teams building global products.
FAQ
Just getting started? These are the top 3 questions we hear:
Q: Do you need our product to be fully built before we start?
A: No. We can begin from early prototypes, staging environments, or even screenshots. If nothing is localized yet, we help identify the highest-impact entry points for Japanese users.
Q: What if we don’t have any Japanese version at all?
A: That’s normal. We start with the parts of the product that actually drive adoption — onboarding, help, tutorials, and UX copy — not only UI strings.
Q: Can you work with AI-generated Japanese drafts?
A: Yes. If the draft comes from GPT-level tools, we can refine it into coherent, natural Japanese. If the draft comes from DeepL or sentence-by-sentence MT, we usually rebuild it — because the structure doesn’t carry over.
If you’re curious how we think about machine translation and AI-assisted work, here’s a detailed look:
DeepL or GPT? Why the Type of AI Translation Matters
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Ready to make your product work in Japan?
Japanese localization built for clarity, confidence, and adoption.
One creator. One pair of languages.
Curious who’s behind IC Eight?
Here’s the human doing the work →