The situation
Strike’s growth was international before its content strategy was solidified. Send Globally opened corridors from the United States into Latin America, Africa, the Philippines and Vietnam, with the recipient taking delivery in local currency. Lending launched in the US and then in a separate world-region variant with its own currency pairs. Spanish-speaking markets were a priority.
Two problems sat on top of each other.
The first was volume. Around 120 help centre entries, an education library, in-app copy, marketing pages and store listings, all of it needing a second language and all of it needing to sound like one company rather than a translation service.
The second was that the product is not the same in every market, and nothing in the English source text tells you where it differs. Outside the US, a bitcoin-backed loan disburses in USDT rather than dollars. The English entry says the customer receives “cash”, so even a competent translator would write “efectivo” and ship a false statement to an entire market.
Spanish financial vocabulary is also unsettled. Collateral, backed, liquidation, and margin call can be worded differently. Speakers from Mexico, Colombia, Argentina and Spain reach for different words and are confident about it.
The strategy
Settle the vocabulary before scaling, then use AI for the volume with human taste and judgement.
Terminology came first and was locked as part of the internal documentation. I ran the contested words through our internal Spanish-speaking team, who came from four countries, and fixed the outcomes in a glossary. We would debate about “garantía” once, and then never again.
Brand voice came second. Before any bulk work, I wrote a reference set by hand and used it to define what Strike sounds like in Spanish, which is a different question from what Strike sounds like translated. That reference set plus the glossary became the standing context for everything that followed.
Then the volume, with AI carrying the draft and me carrying three things it could not do. It could not know where the product diverges by market, so every entry was checked against what the product actually does at that border before it was written. It could not resolve regional vocabulary, which was already decided, and it could not hear when a sentence was technically correct yet tonally wrong, which is most of what review time went on.
I also wrote the Spanish versions of selected pages I had not written in English. Some landing pages, blog posts and announcements were drafted by others, so the Spanish site carried a single voice where the English one could carry several.
Selected work
English
Bitcoin-backed loans let you unlock your bitcoin’s buying power, without selling your bitcoin. By using bitcoin as collateral, you can access immediate cash liquidity, while maintaining benefits of holding bitcoin for the long-term.
Español
Los préstamos respaldados por bitcoin te permiten desbloquear el poder de compra de tu bitcoin, sin vender tu bitcoin. Al utilizar bitcoin como garantía, puedes acceder a liquidez en efectivo (USDT) inmediata, manteniendo los beneficios de mantener bitcoin a largo plazo.
Nothing in the English string signals that this needs to change, which is why the check happened before translation rather than during review. “Efectivo (USDT)” carries a link to a separate entry explaining a USDT balance, and that entry only exists in Spanish because only the world-region product has one.
This is also the reason the glossary alone was not enough. A locked vocabulary keeps the words consistent. It does not tell you when the underlying product changed.
Send Globally allows you to send money worldwide so recipients receive it in their local currency. It utilizes Bitcoin’s Lightning Network for fast, low-cost cash-to-bitcoin-to-cash transactions, without either the sender or the recipient needing to own bitcoin.
It’s a cash-bitcoin-cash transaction, where the sender and recipient only ever hold cash.
The two audiences for this product barely overlap. People sending money to family want to know it arrives, and some of them have reason to distrust anything with “bitcoin” in it. Bitcoiners want practical uses for their bitcoin, and expressly want to know how transfers work under the hood.
Naming the technology and then closing it off in the same breath is what lets one paragraph serve both. A bitcoiner reads the middle clause and stops, whereas a remitter reads the second sentence and is reassured that they never touch bitcoin. Splitting this into two pages was the obvious alternative and would have meant maintaining two truths.
Glossary first. Contested financial terms resolved with the internal Spanish-speaking team, from four countries, and locked before any volume work started.
Reference set by hand. A body of entries written manually to establish register, sentence length and how much explanation a Spanish-speaking reader expects, which is not the same as the English default.
Product-difference check before drafting. Every entry compared against what the product does in that market, since the source text never flags it.
AI for the draft, at library scale, with the glossary and reference set as standing context.
Human review on register, not accuracy. Machine translation gets meaning right and tone wrong, and tone is what makes a hundred and twenty entries sound like one company.
The order matters more than the actual layers of the translation system. Running the volume first and correcting afterwards produces a library that is individually accurate but collectively incoherent, which is a common failure of most localisation programmes. Deciding the vocabulary and the register up front is what turned a translation task into a voice.
Scope
Around 120 help centre entries per language across eleven categories, plus the marketing pages, push notifications, the blog, the announcements and all the in-app copy. I also wrote the App Store and Play Store listings, working with the company President on which capabilities to prioritize.
Outcome
A fully bilingual company. The app, the help centre, the marketing site, the education library and the blog all shipped in Spanish alongside English, maintained by one person rather than a localisation vendor.
That work was the content part of Strike’s move from a US product to a global one. The company runs its global headquarters out of El Salvador, and bitcoin-backed loans are now available to verified users in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Costa Rica, El Salvador, and Guatemala, alongside New Zealand, South Korea and the United States. Six of the nine supported countries are Spanish-speaking or Latin American, and every one of them needed a help centre, an onboarding flow and a loan agreement explanation, and needed them to describe a product that disburses in USDT rather than dollars.
The final adoption figures are private Strike information.
Source: Where are bitcoin-backed loans available?, Strike help centre, checked August 2026.
Written as Senior Content Manager at Strike, 2022 to 2025. In-app copy, help centre, notifications, store listings and all Spanish translations were mine during my tenure. The Spanish library has grown since. Scope described here is the library as of 2025.