Our first suggestion would be to be as precise as possible and use a full locale property (e.g. “fr_FR”) instead of just a generic language (e.g., “fr”). It supports alternate spellings, date formats, and other differences between two countries with a shared language.

It is especially relevant for languages like Spanish, French and Portuguese that have distinct locale differences (Spanish in Spain vs. Spanish in Latin America, French in France vs. in Canada, Portuguese in Portugal vs. Brazil).

If you know that you’re targeting the European market at this time, it probably will make sense to set “es_ES” as a target language. There is a high chance that your company will grow and you’ll expand into the Latin American market, so down the road, you would need a new language to be added to your Transifex projects, specifically for Latam Spanish (“es_419”).

So if you have a clear distinction from the beginning, it will be easier for your internal teams and translators/vendors always to know which language dialect they’re translating into.

Make sure that you and your team that will be managing content in Transifex stay consistent with the choice of languages, as it is linked to essential features in Transifex - such as Translation Memory and Glossary.

Transifex treats language codes “en” and “en_US” as different languages, so you need to make sure that you choose one (e.g. “en_US”) and use it as a source language across all projects.

The same applies to choosing a target language: if you chose “es_ES” for European Spanish, stick to it and use it across all projects; don’t use generic “es” in one of the projects.