In some RFPs today, it is no longer so clear what buyers really value from LSPs. This post explores why. Based on my experience on the buyer side, I share why the real need may be shifting from pure execution toward something harder to explain, but often more useful in practice.
What do you do when someone asks for the ROI of localization and you know the question is too narrow from the start? In this post, I reflect on why I stopped trying to prove isolated ownership and started talking more honestly about contribution.
Reading The Myths of Happiness reminded me of the arrival fallacy: the belief that once we reach a certain goal, everything will finally feel solved. In localization, that can look like waiting for the day when people will finally understand what we do. But organizations keep changing, so that moment may never fully come. And maybe accepting that is exactly what helps us stay grounded, avoid frustration, and keep moving forward.
In many companies, the localization budget does not sit with the localization team. At first, that may seem like a small detail. But over time, it changes how localization influences strategy
Defining localization metrics is relatively easy. In many cases, a team can write a reasonable list during a workshop, like the ones I mentioned above, or during a strategy session. The conceptual part of what to track and why rarely takes long. The real difficulty appears later: HOW you actually obtain those metrics.
AI will not eliminate (initially) localization roles, but it is reducing the time spent on certain tasks. What once took hours can now take minutes. That creates capacity.We can treat that time as a cost savings or reinvest it. If nothing meaningful replaces it, the value of the role will eventually be called into question.Jobs do not disappear because tasks are automated. They disappear when the value is not redefined.
So the real question is: what can you do now with the time AI gives you that wasn't possible before?
The world of localization is full of small, hidden details.
Some things are deeper than they seem, and I often see between in-context review and LQA in the world of Localization. They might seem the same, but if we scratch beneath the surface, we'll see they're not what they seem.
In this post, I want to focus on explaining the differences between in-context review and LQA, which is something I see being confused quite frequently, and although the tasks are similar ... they are not the same.
AI is not eliminating localization. But it is removing the illusion that execution alone is enough.
Layer 1 accuracy, delivery, quality was our playfield. Now AI scales it faster and cheaper. And when value is framed only around execution, the conversation shifts to cost and headcount.
Meanwhile, executives focus on retention and growth.
That’s Layer 2 cultural impact.
In the age of AI, localization must operate in both.
You need a solid localization tech stack before you can build a global digital product. Tools that help manage content, automate workflows, ensure consistency, handle volume, control quality, and scale across languages are essential. Without them, everything becomes slower, more expensive, and harder to manage. Today, we have great tools to support all of this. And yet, despite all these changes, something fundamental hasn’t changed in the ingredients that define good localization.
“Welcome to my blog. The space where I document my passion about Localization, Project Management and Leadership”
Some services and some invoices are difficult to understand. Specially to understand how certain services are charged, and how they are explained. Sometimes we might have the feeling that we are being scammed ... have you ever had that feeling in our Globalization world? For example, in the area of Localization Engineering? If the answer is yes maybe this post is for you ...
Our app’s user experience it’s a complex mix of feelings and emotions, difficult to measure but it has a huge impact in the user satisfaction, and here globalisation best practices play an important role, and UX localization plays also an important role, but is that actually a thing? does UX localisation even exist?
The translation industry is one of the oldest industries in the world, for hundreds of years there have been needs to communicate messages from one language to another. During all these years the translators have had a fundamental role so that people of different languages understand each other. During all these years the translators have been adapting and changing their services, and even today, under the threatening look of MT, AI, NMT and BLA, BLA, BLA, they are pushing back this new reality, they re-invent themselves, and they find a way to remain relevant ... and that’s the reality, the translator is a difficult race to extinguish, they fight, they adapt, they evolve ... and hopefully they’ll continue doing it for many years!
Sometimes knowing the rules of behaviour and soft-skills that I must apply in certain environments is not enough to succeed. Being effective in a high-performance team in a multicultural environment requires something more.
Sometimes having the info and the answer only solves part of the problem of how to be effective across cultures. How do we solve the other part of the problem? How can we be effective in such a global and diverse world as is the localization industry?
That’s the topic I cover in my weekly post. Hope you like it and and please leave your comments with your international experiences on how you adapted to different environments! 🙂
Have a great week!
Miguel
The Project Post-Mortem is a Valuable Tool for Continuous Improvement in our Globalization/Localization projects. However, for different reasons we don’t take the time to perform them, or we are not sure how to drive them. If you recognize yourself in any of these situations maybe my post this week may be useful 🙂
What is the career plan professionals working in the globalization/localization industry might have? Can we become executives in our industry? Or better said, is it possible to increase our "executive presence"? And if so, how?
Doom creator John Carmack said years ago “Story in a game is like story in a porn movie: it’s expected to be there, but it’s not that important.”
This week while having tapas with a friend I had a deja-vú about John’ words ….
The world of Localization is a very multicultural industry. The professionals of this industry at some point in our lives have asked ourselves the following question: but why should I be the one who adapts to this environment? Why do not they adapt to me? :) That's what I cover this week in my post, I hope you like it!
Cultural Intelligence is like a super power that we can develop to lead teams in an effective way in this globalized world in which we live. And no, Emotional Intelligence and Cultural Intelligence is not the same. If you want to know why it is not the same, I invite you to read the post I created this week on my blog 🙂
This week I finish my article on TMS and CMS, the Twins of our Translation industry. In this second part I explain the workflow and integration of a CMS and a TMS. Where the key to success lies in a bit of code that we call API ....
There are some things that look alike, but they are not much the same. Arnold and DeVito are an example of this in the movie industry in the Twins movie, and a CMS and TMS are an example in our Globalization / Localization industry. In this post I talk about cinema and what’s a CMS / TMS and why they are not twin tools :)
This week I bring a special post. It is a summary of the presentation that Maria and I gave on the fascinating topic about culture intelligence.
And why is it a special post? Well…. this post is an eBook! there are so many things that I'm passionate about the world of cultural intelligence that everything I wanted to write did not fit in a single post, so I wrote an eBook 🙂
Here you have an eBook of what I consider to be the future of management ... the cultural intelligence.
Hope you like it! Please send me your comments so we can continue the discussions around this amazing world of the CQ!
Enjoy the journey!
Miguel
The first Game Global Forum is a reality! this week in my post I talk about the first edition of this cool event and also take the opportunity to reflect on how to measure and quantify quality from a new perspective. Have a great week everyone!
This week we had our annual event at King, a new opportunity to explain
that translating, localizing and globalizing is not the same,
that content is more than words and
that a good globalization strategy can not be an afterthought.
Globalizers of the world, localizers of the world … we are magicians! we have content in one language totally indecipherable. And with some tricks we decipher it … but there’s a saying in our industry Garbage IN, garbage OUT … so let’s see how we can keep the garbage under control …
This week I had the pleasure of being invited to give a master class on Localization in the Barcelona videogame incubator.
It was a nice afternoon ... and in my post this week I talk about it, especially on the subject of why continuous localization and agile localization are 2 different disciplines.
Do we always need an extraordinary quality of translation? Or sometimes the Good Enough approach is precisely what we need, which is Good, enough ... in this post I reflect on how to approach good enough in our localization industry ... hope you find this useful!
If we have 20 minutes to explain to a group of executives of our company the importance of Localization in the global results of the company… how do we approach this presentation?. A senior executive team probably does not care much about our glossary maintenance processes, XLIFF conversions or benefits of pseudolocalization. These executives breathe an air different from ours ... and finding a way to breathe “the same air” is vital to get Localization as an important step in the Global strategy of the company.
The Indian market with 1.3 billion inhabitants represents a unique opportunity for the video game market (and for the localization market in general!). It is a market with great potential ... but it is a complex market with 3 obstacles that deserves to be analyzed in order to better understand how a videogame can be profitable in this complex and fragmented market.
Can we still consider the quality of a translation as the only differentiating factor to have a good relationship with our LSP? I do not think so, today I want to talk about why the translation quality is not a differentiating factor anymore.
Several factors affect the duration of localization for a digital product, including translators' availability and the technology setup level. This blog post explores the various elements that impact the amount of time needed for product localization.