Global companies face a critical test: how do you make your brand feel local everywhere, without reinventing the wheel in every market? The answer lies in localization, but not as a transactional service. Today, the most competitive enterprises view localization as a strategic partnership, where the right collaborators provide not only linguistic expertise, but also technology, process innovation, and scale.
At Translated, we believe that localization is a growth enabler. Since 1999, we have partnered with enterprises pursuing international expansion by combining the best of human creativity with the efficiency of AI. Our solutions, like Lara, our language AI, and TranslationOS, our localization platform, are designed to support organizations scaling into dozens of languages and markets with agility.
In this article, we’ll explore how to build a robust localization partnership strategy across collaboration models, vendor selection, relationship management, and success metrics.
Collaboration models: Building the right framework for localization success
Different organizations require different collaboration models based on their content volumes, distribution channels, and expansion speed. Here are four common approaches that define the nature of your relationship with a localization partner.
Project-based collaboration
This is the simplest model, where a company engages a vendor for specific, one-off projects. It’s ideal for businesses entering a new market for the first time or with infrequent, low-volume needs. While it offers flexibility, relying solely on this model can lead to inconsistent quality and a lack of a cohesive brand voice as you work with different teams and vendors.
Preferred vendor model
Here, companies vet and rely on a select roster of trusted vendors. This improves continuity and ensures stylistic consistency across projects. However, managing multiple providers can still introduce governance complexity and may not be the most efficient approach for high-volume, continuous localization needs.
Strategic partnership model
This approach goes far beyond simple project execution. A strategic partner integrates into your workflows, supports your content strategy, measures outcomes, and continuously improves processes alongside you.
At Translated, our localization specialists, engineers, and AI-powered tools operate as true extensions of your team, providing a single, comprehensive solution. Through TranslationOS, our clients gain unparalleled, day-to-day visibility across all projects, languages, vendor assignments, costs, and key performance indicators (KPIs). This level of transparency transforms localization from an opaque outsourced service into a transparent, manageable business function.
Hybrid collaboration
Some organizations need both agility and structure. Translated supports hybrid models by combining dedicated strategic partnership support for critical pipelines with on-demand task execution via our extensive network of over 500,000 language professionals worldwide. This gives you the flexibility to handle urgent or ad-hoc tasks while maintaining a structured, long-term strategy for your core content.
Vendor selection: Why Translated scales with your growth
Choosing the right localization partner is the single most important decision for global companies. Selection criteria must look beyond price and delivery to encompass technology, scalability, and cultural adaptability.
Here’s how Translated meets these requirements:
End-to-end capabilities
From marketing copy and legal documents to e-learning content and customer support scripts, Translated covers the full spectrum of localization needs. Our professional translators are not just linguists; they are cultural experts who adapt tone, style, and nuance to ensure your message resonates with target markets. We also provide a range of specialized services, including transcreation, subtitling, and voice-over, to support your diverse content formats.
AI-powered innovation: Lara and TranslationOS
At Translated, we are AI-first, but human-centric. Our proprietary technologies are the foundation of our strategic partnership approach.
- Lara : Lara is our proprietary language AI system that learns continuously from our vast community of professional translators. The result is a system that can produce near-professional translation quality at an unprecedented speed. Lara accelerates translation throughput without compromising creativity. It produces high-quality drafts that human linguists then refine, saving time and reducing costs while maintaining brand excellence. This powerful synergy between AI and human expertise allows us to deliver high-quality content faster than traditional methods.
- TranslationOS : A first-of-its-kind AI platform built for localization, TranslationOS offers radical transparency and control. This centralized platform gives buyers immediate insights into spend, throughput, deadlines, and quality metrics for every project in real time. This level of control transforms localization into a data-driven enterprise function instead of a hidden outsourcing line item. TranslationOS also integrates seamlessly with your existing technology stack, including content management systems (CMS), product information management (PIM) systems, and marketing automation platforms.
Global translator network
With a professional community of over 500,000 vetted language professionals, Translated can scale across more than 230 languages and dozens of industries. This scale makes us uniquely capable of supporting multinational product launches, massive digital platforms, and sustained international customer support. Our community is not just large; it is highly specialized, with translators vetted for their expertise in specific fields like life sciences, legal, finance, and marketing.
Cultural and operational fit
At Translated, we believe successful partnerships extend beyond tools. We embed dedicated account teams and solution architects into our client workflow, ensuring seamless communication and proactive alignment with your corporate culture. We don’t just provide a service; we become an integral part of your team. Our client-centric approach means we work to understand your goals, challenges, and processes from the ground up.
Scalability and adaptability
Across two decades, Translated has grown alongside clients from Unicorns to Fortune 500s, scaling from single-market pilots to global rollouts. This adaptability is critical for buyers who cannot afford to continually re-evaluate suppliers. Our technology and human network are built to handle sudden spikes in volume, new language requirements, and evolving content needs, all without compromising on quality or speed.
Relationship management: How Translated makes partnerships work
Winning relationships are not transactional; they evolve. This is why Translated invests deeply in partnership management frameworks designed for long-term success.
Governance and collaboration
We schedule regular business reviews, KPI tracking, and strategic planning sessions at a leadership level, ensuring alignment with your global roadmap. Through TranslationOS, governance conversations are based on real-time data, not guesswork. This allows us to work with you to identify areas for efficiency gains, cost optimization, and quality improvements.
Transparency and communication
Our clients benefit from full workflow visibility: task progress, quality scores, human involvement, and AI contributions. This builds trust and accountability, reducing surprises and aligning expectations. We believe in being a transparent partner, giving you a clear view of how your localization program is performing at all times.
Knowledge continuity
We co-develop style guides, glossaries, and cultural playbooks with our clients, ensuring consistency across all markets even as teams or campaigns evolve. This co-created knowledge base is then used to train both our AI models and language professionals, guaranteeing that your brand voice remains consistent everywhere it’s heard.
Co-innovation
One of the hallmarks of a Translated partnership is continuous co-innovation. We don’t just deliver on your current needs; we work with you to anticipate the needs of tomorrow. We pilot new approaches to transcreation, crowd intelligence, and workflow automation tailored to each partner, ensuring your localization strategy is always at the cutting edge.
Success metrics: Measuring the impact of a strategic partner
Localization strategies succeed when outcomes are visible. Unlike traditional vendors, Translated equips buyers with data-rich metrics that assess both operational efficiency and business impact.
Operational metrics
- Turnaround Time (TAT): Time reductions driven by Lara’s AI-drafting capabilities and TranslationOS’ workflow automation.
- Quality Consistency: We provide continuous quality control using a combination of human reviewer feedback loops and our AI quality checks.
- Cost Efficiency: Demonstrable savings through translation memory leverage, AI-human synergy, and the elimination of costly rework cycles.
Strategic metrics
- Time-to-Market Acceleration: TranslationOS enables simultaneous multi-language launches with predictable scalability, helping you get your products and content to new markets faster.
- Customer Experience: Translated’s expertise ensures localized experiences resonate, which is reflected in higher engagement and conversion rates and a lower cost of customer support.
- International Revenue Growth: Enterprises can directly attribute market entry success and higher sales conversion to localization strategies powered by Translated.
Partnership metrics
TranslationOS puts you in control by giving you the data to evaluate our partnership. You can easily track metrics related to our responsiveness, how well we’re adapting to your needs, and the value of our innovative solutions. This transparency provides a clear, data-driven view of our performance.
How Translated can support your global localization strategy
At Translated, we view localization as a strategic partnership that goes beyond simple translation, combining human talent with advanced technology to help you succeed on a global scale.
- Human creativity at scale: You gain access to a community of over 500,000 professional translators. They’re industry experts who understand the cultural nuances needed to make your message feel authentic in any market.
- Innovative AI: Our proprietary tools, Lara and TranslationOS, make the localization process smarter, faster, and completely transparent for you. This means you can get your content to market more quickly and efficiently.
- Scalable solutions: We can handle projects in hundreds of languages and at any volume, so you can expand without worrying about your content keeping up. We maintain the highest quality, whether you’re localizing a small project or an entire product line.
- A trusted partner: Since 1999, we’ve built a reputation for providing the quality and client satisfaction that global brands demand, including partners like Airbnb, Asana, and NordVPN.
Conclusion: Translating ambition into global growth
Your global success requires a strategic approach to localization. It means moving past simple transactions to build a partnership based on clear collaboration models, smart vendor selection, and measurable results.
At Translated we combine human expertise with AI technologies to help your brand feel local, no matter where you do business. Through our platform, TranslationOS, we give you the transparency and scale to achieve your ambitions.
Ready to partner for global growth? Contact us today to learn how we can help.