For Localization Buyers

Hello Navigators! 👋

The localization industry is innovating like mad. Established firms and startups are spinning up tantalizing tools and services to integrate systems, speed up delivery times, and improve quality. This has been a boon for companies going global because it offers a richer array of solutions at lower costs than even just 10 years ago.

The innovation is coming at just the right time. Standard Charters published survey results in 2021 stating that "49% of US companies surveyed saw their best growth opportunities outside of their home region, compared to 35% in June 2020." (US Companies Bullish on Global Growth)

A lot has happened since that was published in March 2021 in terms of inflation, the Russian invasion of the Ukraine, and other geopolitical events, but the core takeaway is unchanged. Global markets are where business decision-makers are seeking growth. With machine translation, continuous localization services, and improved translation tools, they have an unprecedented ecosystem of choice when contemplating what to localize and how to do it.

Here's the catch for newcomers. The pros and cons of the various tools and services are often not easy to detect. In fact, what passes as a pro today could be a con tomorrow. It's the nature of the blistering pace of software development, buffeted by AI and data science.

A few examples.

XTM is a leading translation management systems (TMSs) that provides both cloud-based and on-premise solutions. XTM Cloud is an excellent platform with the ability to layer in AI on top of standard features (translation memory) to lower costs and accelerate turnaround times.  

Interesting, but how soon could this help your company? Would you see benefits right away? Likely, yes, but how soon?  

Intento is an innovative platform that can aggregate multiple streams of machine translation results, detect and prioritize best performing engines for a given domain, all in one place. Also amazing.  

Is the bundled MT approach a good investment?

These are serious topics. If you had a few pints of Guinness in your belly, you might be tempted to start a limerick with 'Weighted Token Levenshtein*,' but it otherwise doesn't exactly roll off the tongue.  

BeLazy automates project workflows between vendor portals, translation management systems, and business management systems. (The antidote to file shuffling and copy and paste!) They acknowledge complexity candidly.

These are all great companies. My point is that finding the right mix of tooling and human services for your product line up needs to be approached with great care. In this series, I introduce a set of characters working for a fictitious company who embark on a series of discovery steps. It's their buyer journey.

I cover word counts, workflows, pricing and leverage, language assets, linguistic QA (QA), vendor selection, machine translation, content management systems, and more. Please visit Part 1: Your Word Counts and a Project Plan to get started.

Please contact me if you have any questions or observations you'd like to share. I'd love to hear from you.

*Levenshtein distance is a higher mathematics concept. Read more about it here. To see how it intersects with translation, read XTM's post on the topic here. And for a quick understanding of why it's important, read this quote: