Your product just hit product-market fit. Usage is growing, revenue is climbing, and your investors want you to expand into new markets. "How hard can localization be?" they ask.
Six months later, your developers are copy-pasting translation files instead of shipping features. Your project manager chases translators via email all day. That "quick" German launch has been "90% done" for three weeks because of constant translation problems.
We've worked with hundreds of product teams whose experiences are not far off from the example above. The companies that break through don't just translate more content: they build localization processes that actually scale. Here are six real problems our customers faced when scaling internationally, and the specific solutions that got them unstuck.
⚠️ Common problems in localization scaling 🔗
1. Manual work is killing your efficiency 🔗
Your current localization process probably looks something like this: developers upload new strings, someone manually sends them to translators, you wait for files to come back via email, then your dev team manually weaves everything back into the product. All that manual work is probably slowing you down. 👷
📎 Learn the 12 reasons why Localazy is better than spreadsheets for software localization projects
Quick translation with ChatGPT won't save you here either. You need proper automation that adapts to your workflow and priorities.
Here's what our users do to cut translation turnaround times with Localazy:
- ▶️ Automatic pre-translation happens the moment your developers upload new strings using built-in machine translation or AI.
- 🔔 Notifications go out to relevant users and translators who review and improve critical content.
- 📨 No translators on staff? Order professional translation services directly through our Continuous Localization Team.
Set up these workflows once, and they run forever. Your CLI integration pushes new strings, Automations trigger machine translation, and human reviewers get notified only for content that needs their attention.
2. Your community wants to help, but you're not set up for it 🔗
Maybe you have a strong community in a particular country but don't want to invest in professional translations yet. Or you're in a regulated industry and need to involve local employees from your company.
A major pharmacy chain and a VR cycling platform both solved this by bringing their people directly into the translation process. Localazy doesn't charge extra for additional users, so you can invite hundreds of VR cycling enthusiasts to translate your product into Chinese. Or invite selected pharmacists from your Romanian branch to review Google Translate's attempts at translating drug interactions on your e-commerce site (before it accidentally tries to harm your customers).
Use Language Permissions to restrict contributors to only the languages they're qualified for, and our review system will ensure quality control before anything goes live.
3. Duplicate strings and team conflicts are inevitable 🔗
How many developers do you have? How many development teams?
The bigger you get, the more inevitable it becomes that you'll create duplicate strings or that teams will overwrite each other's work. 🤼
Our advanced customers handle conflicts in different ways, but the most sophisticated approach uses Project Branching. A major e-commerce platform runs about seven concurrent branches of its main project within the Localazy platform. A developer working on a new feature doesn't have to worry about conflicting with the production project.
The bonus is that translators can start working on translations even while a new funcionality is still in development. When everything's ready, you merge branches with built-in conflict resolution and move forward. Those duplicates can also be dealt with: instead of translating buttons like "Save" and "Cancel" as many times as you have modules, you can use our Connected Projects feature to share Translation Memory across projects.
But identical text doesn't always have identical meaning. That's why we built Duplicity Linking. One string acts as the source for others and shares translations between them. The rest stay hidden from translators, saving time, money, and confusion about context. Share as in "sharing content" or share as in "stock shares"? 🤔 Solve it once and you're done.
4. Fixing translation bugs takes forever 🔗
What happens when you discover a translation error in production? Do you call the developers to swap out the text? When you want to add an entirely new language, how long will that take them? ⌛
Developers prefer programming to copy-pasting text files. Customers use Localazy CDN to save developer time and speed up translation delivery to production.
Here's how it works: changes you publish in Localazy are available on the CDN within minutes. Connect your production server to the CDN, and you don't need to bother developers when you find a typo. Use Releases to manage different versions for staging and production environments.
For mobile apps, we have OTA (Over-the-Air) updates that work on the same principle. You don't have to wait for Apple or Google store approval.
5. Everything lives in different tools 🔗
Translating a mobile app is one thing, but what happens when you also want to translate your website, documentation, or Figma designs?
You need integrations that let you manage everything in one place, draw from shared context, and track progress across all your content.
📎 Find your integration among 50+ file formats and 3rd-party solutions, from CMS to Helpdesk
Our native integrations with Figma, Strapi, Storyblok, Webflow, and Intercom allow you to manage translations for designs, websites, and help documentation all from one dashboard — and without the hassle of juggling multiple tools. 🤹♂️
Use Connected Projects to share glossaries and your Translation Memory across all these different content sources, so your brand voice stays consistent whether someone's reading your app, your website, or your help docs.
6. Context gets lost in translation 🔗
I mentioned context in the previous section, but let's dig deeper.
How do you effectively pass context to translators? Does your agency ask follow-up questions via email, and will you have to go through this again when you add the next language? 🫗
Start with our Glossary feature, where you define phrases important to your brand or product and their translations. You can also provide Context Screenshots (with automatic OCR linking that recognizes text in images and automatically suggests which strings to link them to), comments, or complete brand style guides through Localazy.
📚 Learn how to prepare your style guide for software localization in our guide
This context gets shared not just with translators but also with integrated AI models through Localazy AI. That means even the first iteration of translation can achieve high quality because you provide your brand and product context.
🚀 How to scale localization the right way 🔗
Here's your roadmap:
The teams that get this right translate faster and build robust localization processes that actually scale with their growth, instead of becoming bigger bottlenecks every quarter.
✋ Stop fighting your localization process 🔗
Every problem I've outlined here stems from the same root issue: trying to scale manual processes that weren't designed for growth. Localazy solves this by giving you a platform that automates the tedious stuff, connects all your tools, and gets smarter as you use it.
Whether you're a startup expanding to your first international market or an established company adding your 20th language, you need localization infrastructure that grows with you. Localazy handles the complexity so you can focus on building great products for a global audience.
