Voice & quality

Languages

Write for any language and any country - written in the language from the start, never translated from English, with the local press style in the countries we have curated.

Language and country are settings on each domain and on your profile, not a separate product. Set them once, and every article for that domain - asked for by hand or written by the autonomous newsroom - comes out in that language, written for that country.

On this page

Any language, any country

Mastheads writes in any language, for any country. The language picker offers 30 languages, and you choose the country separately - Spanish for Spain is not Spanish for Mexico, and English for Ireland is not English for the United States.

If you set up a domain from your website, the scan reads its language and country for you. You can change both in the domain's Article defaults.

Written in the language, not translated

Articles are written in the target language from the start. The headline and the section headings are written for that language too, not translated from an English template. There is no English draft underneath.

The local press style, where we have curated it

A language is not the whole story. Newsrooms in different countries write differently - how they quote, how they write money and dates, how a news story ends. For these 11 countries, Mastheads follows the local press style:

Australia · Canada · Germany · India · Ireland · Netherlands · Norway · Sweden · Switzerland · United Kingdom · United States

Some examples of what that means:

German articles use German quotation marks, „like this“, with the comma after the closing mark.
Swedish news stories end on the last fact, not on a summary.
Money and dates are written the way that country writes them.
Reading level is measured with LIX outside English - a readability scale that works across languages - instead of an English formula.

Everywhere else: the language, plainly

For a country outside that list, the article is written in your language plainly, with no invented local style. We would rather follow no local convention than guess one wrong - an earlier version of this product put dollar signs into French articles, and it does not any more. You still get the language; you do not get a style we have not checked.

The label goes in the article's language

When the autonomous newsroom publishes an article on its own, the AI disclosure line - "This article was created with AI assistance." - is written in the article's own language, in all 30 languages the picker offers. A Japanese article does not carry an English label.

Checked like every other article

Whatever the language, the article goes through the same ten editorial desks, the same voice settings and the same checks. An article that comes back in the wrong language - English when you asked for Dutch - is held as Needs a look, never shipped as if it were right.

One subscription, every language

No plan limits which languages you write in. Run one domain in Dutch and another in Norwegian on the same plan, up to your plan's number of sites.