Most localization problems aren’t caused by translation—they’re caused by decisions made long before anything is translated.
This is why localization needs to be upstreamed into product, marketing, and naming decisions.
At Notion, which overall had an excellent marketing team, we would usually find out about new campaigns just prior to launch. Usually this was not a problem because their messages were good, but occasionally they would give us material that would not work culturally. I remember one campaign in particular.
Your life and your work, all in one place.
This sounds great, if you work for a startup in San Francisco, but nearly everywhere else nobody wants their life and their work all in one place. This put us in the awkward position of explaining that we could translate the campaign, but it would not land well (it didn’t).
This is why localization needs to be upstreamed into product, marketing, and naming decisions—before those decisions are finalized. This is less of a technical issue and more of an organizational culture issue. Upstreaming means involving localization in decisions before they are finalized, when names, messaging, and product behavior are still being defined. Like localization infrastructure, upstreaming is about integrating localization into how systems and decisions are made, not treating it as a downstream task.
This problem typically shows up in three areas:
- A new product, brand or feature and the terminology around it is being developed
- Evolving popular jargon is being incorporated into the product or company messaging
- An international marketing campaign is being developed
Product And Feature Development
Companies will usually spend a considerable amount of time developing new products, features and terminology around them. These teams should engage the localization team early on for their input, and so they can develop guidelines for translating and localizing names and terms. This is why glossaries and style guides are important because there are often many ways to say something.
Poor naming decisions can have real consequences—like the Commodore “Pet” launch in France, where the name had an unintended, and not pleasant, meaning.
While this problem is more organizational than technical, one thing companies can do is to connect design and prototyping tools like Figma into the localization pipeline. This will result in new names and terms showing up in the translation pipeline, and will give them of spotting something early on.
The better solution is to have a formal process for vetting new names and terminology, so that localization teams can provide their input.
These decisions are difficult to change later, which makes early involvement critical.
Popular Jargon
Software localization has a long history, and because of the importance of software in society, it influences language. Technical terms like “email” have unwieldy translations in many languages, and in some cases, no direct translation at all. Quite often, translations will emerge organically in a society. Ignoring this leads to inconsistent or unnatural translations that don’t match how users actually speak.
Companies often interact with customers in social media and other forums where they congregate. These forums are a good place to gather insights into how they are discussing your brand, products and terminology.
International Marketing Campaigns
This is a common occurrence and annoyance for centralized localization teams. Regional marketing and sales teams will often come in with late landing requests to localize a campaign that has a hard deadline. By then, it is usually too late to fix things if their campaign is not translatable or culturally mismatched.
A better solution is to empower regional teams to run their own campaigns that are developed in-house or with the help of an agency in that region. Centralized localization teams generally focus on product localization and supporting assets, and are not usually marketers. By all means, leverage their technology, but it generally works best if local teams own these initiatives.
A Good Use Case For Slack
A simple way to operationalize this is to create a shared channel for reviewing new terminology and campaigns, ensuring localization stakeholders are involved early.
Upstreaming localization is one of the highest-leverage changes a company can make.
It reduces rework, improves quality, and ensures that global expansion efforts actually resonate in local markets.
Like localization infrastructure, it’s not about adding more process, it’s about integrating localization into how decisions are made.
Related Reading
Org Design : Where Should Localization Live? – this is a critical decision because localization often has unclear ownership or rolls up to teams that aren’t the best fit. This article discusses best practices in org design and how to position localization for success.
Get Out Of The User’s Way – before you formally localize, design your product so users can interact with it in their own language; Notion built a 70% non-US user base this way.
Building Out A Localization Team – this article explains typical localization team structure, and how even large companies can accomplish a lot with a combination of lean teams and vendors/contractors.
Which Languages Should We Target – this article introduces a data driven methodology for targeting, ranking and sequencing language releases using a combination of factors.
Video Captioning And Subtitling – this article explains how to caption and subtitle streaming assets in multiple languages.