About Dovetale · Lawrence, NY

You want someone careful with your words. Here’s who that is.

Name: Dovetale
Address: 10 Waverly Place, Lawrence, NY, 11559, US
Telephone: (516) 374-9439

Dovetale is a small studio on Waverly Place in Lawrence, NY. We put indie games and apps into Spanish, Portuguese and French, and we try to make the whole thing feel calm for you: a written quote first, a person you can call, and one invoice at the end.

Handing your strings to a stranger can feel risky. This page explains how we work so you know what to expect before you send anything.

A desk with a marked-up strings printout, a phone showing a translated game menu and a small wooden dovetail joint

Why the name

A dovetail joint holds because both sides are cut to fit each other

Woodworkers cut a dovetail so two boards lock together without glue or screws. Localization works the same way. Your English is one board. The Spanish, Portuguese or French is the other. If either is cut carelessly, the joint shows.

We started Dovetale after seeing good small games lose players to a button that said the wrong thing, or a store page that read like a machine wrote it. Small teams rarely have a native reader on hand for every language, and they shouldn’t need one. That’s the gap we fill.

We would rather ask you one question than guess and ship it.

Your English stays exactly as you wrote it. Our work is the other half of the joint.

What we promise

Four promises you can hold us to

We ask before we guess
Short strings like “Back”, “Charge” and “Draw” can mean several things. We send you a short list of questions on day two, so the word a player sees a hundred times is the right one.
Your code is never touched
Placeholders such as %@ and {name}, plurals and line breaks come back exactly as you wrote them. We translate the words and leave the machinery alone.
The price is on paper first
Every project starts with a written quote listing words, languages and dates. You approve it, or you don’t. Nothing is billed until files are delivered.
We tell you what we chose, and why
Each delivery comes with a short note on the judgment calls: a joke we reworked, a slang term we avoided, a name we left in English. One round of revisions is included.

How we read your game

Five habits that stay the same on every project

Habit one

One variant per file

We never blend Mexican, Argentine and Castilian Spanish in one file. You choose the target, and every string follows it.

Habit two

Tone is settled on the first call

Whether the game speaks to players as tú or usted, tu or vous, is agreed in writing before the first word is translated.

Habit three

We write inside the limits

App names, subtitles and keywords are drafted against the store’s character limits from the first line, not trimmed at the end.

Habit four

A device, not a spreadsheet

In-context QA means a linguist plays your build on a phone, in order, the way a new player would.

Habit five

Nothing renews itself

No subscription, no auto-billing. If you come back for an update, we quote that update as its own small job.

Three phones from above showing the same game menu in Spanish, Portuguese and French

Talk to the studio

Tell us about your game. A person replies the next working day.

A title, the languages you’re thinking about and a rough word count is plenty. If you’re not sure yet, say so. Nothing is billed until you approve a written quote.

The studio

Prefer to talk it through? Book a call.

Address

10 Waverly Place
Lawrence, NY 11559

Hours

By appointment — book a call

Phone & email

(516) 374-9439
contact@joindovetale.com

Call (516) 374-9439 Find the studio door