I’ve been working in the localization technology space for 20 years now, and built out and led the localization teams at leading Internet brands, including Lyft, Medium, and Notion. I’ve been writing about translation technology and services since 2008 (this website was originally a buyers guide as translationreports.com)
I founded Localization Technology Partners to provide startups and scale-ups with localization program management and architecture as a managed service. Most companies have no prior experience with this, and even well resourced companies struggle to staff it.
My colleagues and I can help your company build a solid technical foundation for operating across countries and regions. For early stage companies, we’ll train your EPD (engineering, product and design) staff on design and coding patterns that will prevent the accumulation of costly tech debt.
For companies that are ready to start expanding internationally, we’ve managed this at a half dozen companies, and can help you build out the infrastructure and tooling to operate with velocity at global scale.
Where I’ve Done This Work
Notion
I built out and led the localization team at Notion and over 2 years, scaled the company from 2 to 12 languages and dialects, and over 65% non-US revenue. The company now operates in 19 languages and dialects, with 75% of revenue coming from non-US users.
Lyft
When I joined Lyft only operated in English and only in the US. I initially worked on their expansion to Canada, and then built and led localization where we launched six languages for riders and drivers.
Medium
Medium, like Notion, was experiencing organic market in non-English regions, Brazil in particular. We rolled out four interface and help center languages, along with curation and editorial features that made it easy to find good content in other languages. The infrastructure and workflows we built during the engagement remain a model for how to scale multilingual publishing platforms.
Blackline Systems
Blackline is a post-IPO accounting automation platform that caters to enterprise customers. I built out the localization tech and team there, primarily to assist users in offshore or back office locations who speak English as a second language or have limited English proficiency.
Worldwide Lexicon
The worldwide lexicon was an open source platform launched in 2008 that blended professional, machine and crowd translation. The platform was hosted on Google App Engine, which at the time was the first server-less cloud computing platform. While the project is no longer active it anticipated the development of modern, cloud based translation platforms by several years.
You must be logged in to post a comment.