Imagine you are getting ready to launch a version of your software for a new market. The translation has been reviewed and approved. The product is nearly ready for release when a tester doing a quick check uncovers a problem: a link connected to one of the translated buttons was changed somewhere in the process. The button looks right, but clicking it now sends users to the wrong place. Or to nowhere at all.
What’s even worse than discovering these errors during testing? Your end users discovering them for you.
Problems might show up in any number of ways: Button labels no longer fit on their buttons. Text gets cut off at the wrong places, or menus get too crowded to read. When the product is localized into a language that reads from right to left, parts of the interface may need to work differently, too.
These are the things that go well beyond just changing the words, and these are exactly the kinds of issues localization engineering is designed to address.
The Ripple Effects of Translation Without Engineering
The content you send for translation rarely exists as words alone. It may be part of a website, eLearning course, or app, embedded in software, arranged within a designed document, or paired with graphics and other visual elements.
You can’t just translate all the text in a file and call it done. Digital files may contain code, placeholders, links, or formatting instructions. Designed materials have layouts, tables, graphics, and other elements that may need to be tagged/hiding before importing the content into the translation tool.
The localization engineer accounts for all of these variables before translation begins, handling the necessary technical or production work to export and reimport text, and checking the finished deliverable afterward.
When that work is not included in the original scope, your developers, designers, product team, marketing team, or another vendor may have to pick it up later. That can mean additional work, additional expense, and another round of review when you thought the project was complete.
This is why localization needs to be planned as a process rather than priced simply as a collection of words.
What Is Localization Engineering?
Localization engineering prepares your files for translation, whether through human review or a secure, trained translation engine, and returns them in the format you submitted. As our team puts it:
“Translation changes the words. Localization engineering makes sure changing those words does not break the product.”
It covers three parts of the process.
1. Prepare Content for Translation
Engineers separate the text that needs translating from the code, placeholders, file paths, and links the product needs to function. Translators can then focus on the language without accidentally changing anything they shouldn’t. The same applies to diagrams, presentations, and designed documents, where translatable text is often mixed in with graphics.
2. Account for How Translation Changes the Layout
Translated text rarely takes up the same space as the original. Short strings can expand 200–300% from English to German, headings wrap onto extra lines, and tables or diagrams stop fitting. Shorter translations can leave awkward gaps. Languages such as Arabic and Hebrew read right to left, which may call for changes to alignment, navigation, and page composition. Catching these differences early lets engineers and designers resolve them before final review.
3. Validate or Test the Finished Deliverable
Once translated content is back in its final format, it needs to be reviewed in context. For an app or website, that means checking functionality, links, fields, and navigation. For a designed document or presentation, it means reviewing layouts, tables, captions, and text placement. Linguistic quality assurance remains part of the process, but the finished deliverable also has to work and look the way it should.
The Hidden Cost of Getting It Wrong
If engineering, production, and quality assurance are not included in the original scope, the remaining work can land back on your team.
Your developers may have to extract or reinsert translated content, troubleshoot a functional problem, or run another round of testing. Your design or marketing team may have to rework layouts, resize text, adjust graphics, or fix a presentation that no longer looks right in the translated language. In some cases, you may need to bring in another outside resource to finish the job.
Your team may also have to reopen a project they thought was finished—sending files back and forth, answering questions, reviewing corrections, and waiting for another version before they can publish or launch.
If you don’t account for that work at the start, the cost shows up later as internal time, additional resources, or both.
How We Keep Translation Projects Free from Additional Cost and Rework
The time to identify localization engineering, DTP, production, and QA requirements is during scoping, not after the translation comes back. At BIG Language Solutions, we plan for them from the start as part of an integrated process. We review your source files, assess what needs to happen throughout localization, and consider the deliverable you need. You also get a clear picture of what BIG will handle and what, if anything, your team will need to do.
A language partner should be able to explain what happens between receiving your source files and returning the finished deliverable. Who prepares the files? What technical work is required? How is translated content reintegrated? What gets tested before delivery? Those answers tell you far more about a project’s true scope than a per-word price.
If your next translation project involves software, complex files, or content with specific production requirements, talk to us about localization engineering. We can help you identify the technical work before translation begins.
