❄ 🥂 🎇 🎀 🎄 🥳 Last year, I wrote a pastiche called the Twelve Days Of Loc[alization] Mess after a client asked about the root causes of localization problems. This week, I wondered if I should repost the blog, perhaps with a few updates — and was amazed to realize that, after one short year, I would change it almost totally. Last year’s loc-mess is still accurate and useful — sort of like a 201-level college course — but the conversations I’m having with clients and vendors have moved ahead substantially.

Here is my updated version for the age of AI:

On the twelfth day of loc-mess, my PM sent to me:

💻 Twelve all-English meetings

💁🏽‍♀️ Eleven stressed employees

🔨 Ten manual workflows

✅ Nine forms of QA

🤖 Eight unsafe LLMs

🌍 Seven language options

🏦 Six old-fashioned vendors

👨🏿‍💻 Five random TaaFs

📊 Four boring dashboards

🙋🏽‍♂️ Three confused execs

👩🏾‍💼 Two (too) few good leaders

🎯 And a non-audience-centric strategy.

Your Loc-Mess Doesn’t Have To Be A Loc-Miss

Any of these issues can reduce localization ROI. They have different root causes. And all of them are solvable. Let’s look at them one by one:

  • All-English meetings. If you aren’t using AI to transcribe or dub your meetings, events, and videos into multiple languages, you are missing out on one of the fastest-growing and most transformative areas in localization. Transcribed subtitles are already an expectation for many audiences, and live dubbing, lip-synching, and translated, AI-generated summaries are becoming common.
  • Stressed employees. For years, customer-facing employees and partners have struggled to communicate across language barriers. Sales and support staffing has been less flexible due to the need for language coverage. Now, businesses and governments are buying tools that enable multilingual live interactions, online chats, and emails — not just in one application but in all of them. When talking to clients, I’ve observed that when translation tools are available to everyone, adoption exceeds expectations by many multiples.
  • Manual workflows. AI should automate every part of the localization workflow. If your teams are still submitting POs and doing manual file transfer; if translation occurs after development; or if your content teams are writing regional variations instead of using multilingual AI transcreation, you are missing out. Some of these tools are mature and others require more oversight, but the trend is overwhelming and accelerating.
  • Linguistic quality assurance (LQA). Quality is not something you measure at the end — it’s something that you build into the entire process. In localization, that means cleaning up your content, translation memories, and glossaries; training neural machine translation (NMT) and large language models (LLMs); using linguistic quality evaluation (LQE) to select the best translation method; using auto-LQA for routine quality checks and humans for nuanced judgments; and continually improving MT/LLMs based on data.
  • Unsafe LLMs. A BYOAI approach to translation is a terrible idea. Just like you don’t want your employees using public, unsecured, unbranded ChatGPT in your main language, you don’t want them using it to elevate risk in every language. Free translation tools are fine for foreign menus, not finance emails. Invest in trained, secure, paid LLMs for the whole company.
  • Few supported languages. For decades, most B2B companies have translated into fewer than 10 languages, out of over 7,000 worldwide. Localization LLMs are changing this. Microsoft, Amazon, Google, DeepL, and others are expanding translation capabilities into hundreds of “language pairs” (e.g., English-French or Japanese-Thai), enabling companies to reach untapped markets. I predict that “EFIGS-JCK” support (English, French, Italian, German, Spanish, Japanese, Chinese, Korean) will become the mark of an old-fashioned business within a few years.
  • Traditional vendors. The commodification of localization will elevate some vendors, eliminate others, and change almost all of them. This is the time to start treating your localization service and technology providers as strategic partners, not order-takers. Talk about their roadmaps. Ask how they will help you gain the benefits of AI while mitigating risk. Ask about new pricing and packaging models. Ask where human translators are still needed and where you can switch to NMT and LLMs. Look for vendors who are bold — and wise.
  • Random TaaFs. Translation as a feature (TaaF) is showing up in applications everywhere: content management systems, chatbots, customer support systems, event software, meeting tools, etc. On the one hand, this is great. On the other hand, without central oversight, you’ll have inaccuracy, inconsistency, and inefficiency. If one group has already trained an LLM, then ask other vendors about leveraging it. Why pay twice for worse results?
  • Boring dashboards. Localization is usually a revenue enabler, not a revenue generator, and it affects touchpoints throughout the customer and employee lifecycle. Measuring ROI and justifying investment is hard. The Forrester Balanced Scorecard for localization assesses audience experience and financial impact, agility, and operations while also showing how to talk to executives about localization impact in terms they’ll understand.
  • Confused execs. When technology markets are undergoing rapid change, executives need clarity. Clients report that their decision-makers are asking: Do we still need human translators? Can we eliminate the localization budget now that TaaFs exist? Are NMT and LLMs the same thing, and are they both still relevant? Yes, no, no, and yes — but next year, the answers might change. Forrester’s Chart Your Course To Growth-Focused Localization helps business leaders create an aligned strategy over a 3–5-year horizon.
  • Good leaders. More than ever before, you need expert localization leaders to guide your strategy and execution. It’s no longer adequate, if it ever was, to have disconnected localization efforts and technologies across functions and locales. Hire people who understand the details and implications of different solutions, giving them strategic oversight and accountability.
  • Audience-centric strategy. None of the rest matters if you aren’t giving customers, partners, and employees what they need. Unless you have unlimited budget, localization prioritization is a tough nut to crack. Companies must look at touchpoints across the customer and employee lifecycle and assess preferences in each country and language. Forrester customers can take advantage of the Forrester Localization Prioritization Tool to find out where they’ll get the most bang for their buck.

Want to talk about getting rid of the loc-mess and replacing it with a targeted, technically savvy system? Contact your Forrester account manager to set up a guidance session with me.