Hugo Leopold

I'm Hugo, a 21-year-old Dutch freelancer based in Rotterdam. I specialise in localisation and transcreation for e-commerce and D2C brands — taking English copy and rebuilding it in Dutch that actually sounds like Dutch.

I got into this because I kept seeing the same problem: brands putting real money into their Dutch-market presence, but with copy that clearly came out of a translation tool. It undermines everything. A good product deserves copy that works just as hard as the marketing behind it.

What drives me is the craft of it. The difference between a sentence that converts and one that doesn't is often one word, one rhythm, one cultural reference that lands differently. I find that genuinely interesting — and I think that curiosity is what makes the difference between a translator and someone who actually understands copy.

I've worked on SEO pages, product copy, Meta ads, email campaigns, and full-length guides — always from English source material, often alongside non-Dutch creative teams. I'm easy to work with, ask the right questions before I start, and I push back when something won't work in Dutch. That's part of the job.