Building Your Localization Strategy: Pros and Cons of Outsourcing

Many startups begin localizing their content with a bilingual employee who’s already on staff in another department. Hypothetically, this approach costs next to nothing in terms of additional dollars. An employee is likely to be thrilled and honored to use their language proficiency in some capacity—at least, until they realize how much work actually goes into localization.

It soon becomes all too clear that your star employee doesn’t have time to handle translation work on top of their existing responsibilities. They’re always pressed for time. They might grow to resent being pulled into the additional workload as localization progresses. Big projects stall, and pivoting is almost impossible.

Managers will realize quickly that this approach doesn’t produce high-quality content. Though your employees are well-meaning and hard-working, they haven’t gone through the necessary training that qualifies them to be translators. Speaking a language fluently or studying it in school does not provide someone with the technical skills they need to produce quality translations.

This is the most “Goldilocks” strategy on our list. If you can manage to keep an internal translation team busy, this approach tends to have the lowest per-word fee. But this strategy depends on a very fragile balance. Your company has to be large enough to produce a significant daily localization workload to make in-house translators practical. On the flip side, this strategy tends to break down after you surpass 3 or 4 target languages, which makes it ironically unfit for companies that are too large. Hiring full-time translators in each of those languages quickly becomes cost prohibitive with salaries and benefits. And you’ll need to also have managers enough to play point on the team as your projects scale.

Having a fully in-house team of translators allows you to maintain an agile workflow. You have the luxury of changing priorities at the drop of a hat—up until a point. Too often, though, in-house teams get quickly tied up with certain kinds of content, and the whole system jams up. You also need to be aware that translation work tends to run on a “feast or famine” cycle. If you rely on an in-house team of translators, you need to be prepared to keep everyone productive during the inevitable down time between projects.

By hiring an in-house team, you’re ensuring that your translators really understand your product and produce superior-quality work as a result. You might even have them doing double duty as copy editors and writers, which helps relieve some stress from your internal marketing team. And because these employees are fully invested in to your brand messaging and production goals, they can help find issues in your source content or provide valuable insights for customizing UX.

By hiring external freelancers to translate your content, you’re also able to secure a low cost per word. But don’t forget to account for the time your project managers will have to spend chasing after freelancers and keeping track of content. Depending on the size of your company, you could have three salaried employees whose only job is to email freelancers and in-market reviewers and track everything on spreadsheets. That’s not exactly efficient.

It’s incredibly hard to maintain a flexible and scalable team when you’re relying on freelancers. As soon as your lead French translator takes an unexpected leave of absence, you’ll be in a real bind. And when you receive your first huge localization project with a demanding deadline, you’ll realize that this strategy just isn’t scalable without a huge pool of freelance talent.

Freelancers can definitely produce quality translation work. The quality of your content really depends on how involved you are. If you provide plenty of clear guidelines, product specs, brand style guides, and opportunities for Q&A, your team will likely hit the mark and produce high-quality work. But keep in mind that every time you hire a new freelancer, you’ll be starting that process from scratch. You’ll spend a lot of time establishing quality standards and running manual quality control from your desk.

Adding in-house editors to your freelance operation introduces an additional level of expense. If you have the funds, this is a great way to approach the issues that arise with freelance localization. You still need to maintain a high volume of localization work to keep everyone busy. But adding in-house experts can help balance the risk of relying on freelancers for your translation work.

Splitting your team between in-house and outsourced talent creates a favorable balance when it comes to flexibility. Your in-house editors can respond to immediate needs with urgency, and you have an army of freelance translators working on large scale work in the background. This makes localization happen much faster overall.

The editors you hire will spend most of their time overseeing outsourced freelancers or language service providers (LSPs), so you can expect them to maintain a higher level of quality across all of your content. Better yet, your in-house team knows enough to be involved in complex transcreation work. They could even help you write compelling marketing copy or adapt your UX in their spare time when they’re not overseeing the primary external work.

Hiring external single-language vendors (SLVs) to handle your translations is more expensive than hiring freelancers but less than a multi-language vendor. The main drawback of this system is that you need to manage a vendor relationship (and a fee) for each of your target languages. These costs add up quickly, and it can be hard to keep track. If your company is planning to go global and target more than a handful of locales, you’d be better off choosing a more efficient and budget-friendly strategy.

Single-language vendors specialize in one language (or a couple regional languages) and have a deep pool of translators to choose from. They may not be able to pivot as fast as a fully internal team, but they have the bandwidth to scale up to large volumes of work for a single language as needed. Ultimately, if you need to be able to add new languages at the drop of a dime, this is not a good approach.

There are hundreds of SLVs, and many are highly respectable. But, in general, SLVs keep their clients behind a thick curtain when it comes to translation work. If you’re thinking about handling localization with this strategy, you need to be ready to deal with a serious lack of transparency and handle the other consequences of their somewhat-sticky reputation. Client complaints paint a very unfavorable picture of this segment of the language industry.
Here’s a common example: Let’s say the leader of the SLV you hire is highly talented and says she’ll be working on your content personally. You receive top quality on your pilot project. You continue to purchase services. But over time, you notice the translation quality deteriorating. Come to find out, many SLVs pass legacy projects on to junior translators in order to turn a better profit. Most claim that every translation is reviewed by senior translators, but that’s clearly not always the case. Make sure you choose an SLV that’s worthy of your trust.

Hiring a big-box LSP is the highest-cost option on this list, but you do get a lot for your money. In addition to high-level localization consulting, you could receive project management support, translation services, file parsing support, and access to technology. While the tech is usually free, be aware that many big-box LSPs require that you use their localization technology, and it may not be the cutting-edge option. You don’t want to be held hostage with sub-par tech that you have to depend on for the next five years.

This strategy may cost a lot, but it pays well in flexibility and scalability. Partnering with a multi-language vendor (MLV) takes a lot of the headache out of localization. They’ll help you manage complex workflows with ease. And a good MLV can support your company’s growth into as many markets as you can afford. However, if you do get locked into their technology, you may not have the flexibility to make a change down the road.

Like SLVs, many MLVs also tend to operate behind that restrictive translation curtain. They won’t let you see who’s actually doing your translation work—mainly because they hire translators who are six degrees of separation away from you. Who knows what credentials they have? You definitely won’t know unless you ask—and maybe not even then. Often, the largest LSPs don’t even know who is doing the translation! They farm the work out to the SLVs. So, it ends up being a double curtain of obscurity.

This final strategy comes at a more competitive price than most big-box LSPs. By investing in an integrated continuous localization platform and relying on managed back-end services, you’ll reach new heights of automation at a more reasonable cost. This is one case in which technology actually saves you money.

One caveat: be sure you’ll be getting unlimited use from the platform before you sign on. Some companies make their localization product seem reasonable but then hit you with wild charges in the fine print. Question whether you’ll be charged extra if you go over the volume limits for translation, if you add additional users, or if more people visit your translated webpage.

Automated integrations make content movement extremely agile. Just make sure your new partner has the engineering skill to get your integrations set up properly and in a timely fashion. The platform you choose should also come with tools such as terminology management, quality assurance, and asset review (for media and graphics files) that will greatly enhance the quality of your market-facing materials.

By hiring a localization platform with managed services on the backend, you get the benefit of being able to scale with large pools of translators who are already familiar with the technology. If your partner is willing to be transparent, you also get to enjoy unparalleled visibility of who’s doing your translations. You can actually develop a relationship with your lead translators just as you would if you worked with them in-house. This results in better buy-in and engagement from translators and better translations for you.

From the start, be sure that the translators taking on your content are well vetted. Some platforms are good at technology but new to services. Be sure you have a partner who really knows what it takes to recruit and retain the best translators in the industry. Don’t settle for the next translator in the queue.