At most companies, localization is a relatively small department that is backed up by a small army of vendors and freelancers. Whether you plan to build this team or outsource, the structure of the team will largely be the same.
The localization program manager is a subject expert whose responsibilities typically include a mix of system architecture, engineering management and training, along with vendor selection and management. The localization industry is a complicated and specialized place, so it is helpful for the department to be led by someone who is knowledgeable about the industry, tech and supply chain. It is not like other sectors where a short list of vendors dominate the category. There are literally hundreds of companies that are differentiated by the regions and industry sectors they serve.
Localization operations is a project management role that is specialized around localization and internationalization. These people are usually proficient in one or more CMS (content management system) and TMS (translation management system) environments, and are responsible for coordinating the day to day delivery of translation work products, as well as coordinating review work. At most small to mid-size companies, one or two people will fill these roles.
Software companies will typically engage with translation technology vendors, primarily translation management systems, to localize their applications and related assets such as their help center, video catalog, etc. These companies do not, as a general rule, provide translations themselves, but provide tools that streamline translation work done by vendors and freelancers. Most of these platforms are now AI centric, and make it easy to use a range of translation workflows that combine machine and human translation.
LSPs provide a range of translation and copywriting (transcreation) services. They are typically specialized by region or industry segment. Depending on the languages you target, you may need only a couple of vendors, or several. We generally recommend that companies engage with one traditional LSP (translation agency) as well as a company that specializes in copywriting or transcreation (writing or rewriting original content in other languages). The latter is a different skill and is better suited to high visibility | high impact content such as marketing copy.
Lastly, you’ll want to build a team of reviewers to sign off on vendor work product and fine tune as needed. The best people for this role are power users who both know your product and are native speakers in the languages being targeted. They can also provide a lot of useful guidance on terminology and jargon that external vendors may not be aware of. At Notion, for example, we tapped into our international user community and ambassadors to recruit language leads. This really increased quality because they were aware of what users were expecting (an external agency, no matter how good, will not know your product as well as expert users).
One of the challenges localization faces is most companies don’t know where to put it. At various times in my career I have reported to engineering, product, marketing or customer service (and sometimes to different departments during the course of my role).
I generally think that localization should report to product, especially if engineering and product are closely aligned. It doesn’t matter how well your marketing site is translated if your product is dysfunctional in that language. This is important, because a lot of the issues that cause the product to break in other languages are functional defects, and not problems with translation. It is important to have good engineering support for this reason.
I also think that localization should not report to marketing. While it has an important role to play in supporting marketing, my experience has been that marketing is almost always under-resourced technically. There is also a tendency to “throw stuff over the fence” at the localization team without consulting them about an upcoming campaign.
Another decision you will need to make, and revisit as your company grows, is whether to have a centralized localization team or to allow field offices to own some or all of this work. My general recommendation is to centrally manage translation tech and services, to prevent duplication of effort and spend. It also makes sense for product localization and standardized documentation (e.g. help center), to be managed centrally.
Where you may find value in decentralization is in authoring and managing foreign marketing campaigns, advertising, etc. Even if your company offers an all digital SaaS product, there are a lot of subtle issues in marketing such as brand voice and positioning, local competitors, cultural differences, etc. Even a perfectly translated campaign can fall flat if it doesn’t resonate with customers.
I like to share an example from Notion, which overall was very good with marketing. They ran a campaign that was titled “Your life and your work, all in one place.” While this was appealing to users who did use Notion to manage their day to day like and their small business, it fell flat outside that demographic, and especially in countries where people are accustomed to having a strong separation between their home and work lives.
If local teams had been responsible for authoring localized campaigns, they probably would have caught this sooner and pivoted to a different message. It is also tempting for them to blame underperforming campaigns on translation quality, when that is usually a minor factor in campaign metrics.