Field Notes

Localization can quietly own the global customer experience while still feeling powerless when priorities shift. We’re expected to deliver a high-quality multilingual experience across acquisition, conversion, onboarding, retention, and expansion, yet the real levers often sit with different leaders across marketing, sales, product, and customer success. Kevin O’Donnell, strategic advisor at Global 10X, gets concrete about what “influence” actually looks like inside a cross-functional,...

I sit down with Augstin Da Fieno Delucci, co-founder of Trilogica Global and former Director of Global Data and AI at Microsoft, to unpack a shift that changes how global teams should think about AI: treating context as a system, not a prompt. We’ve all gotten better at generation, better models, better prompting, better fine-tuning. Agustin argues that progress is real, but it hits a ceiling when the surrounding architecture has no memory of what “good performance” looks like across markets...

Your translation management system might not be failing, but it can still be quietly throttling your localization program. Stephanie and Giulia Greco unpack why many client-side localization professionals feel stuck right now: TMS platforms that looked “end to end” in the sales cycle start showing real product gaps once you add more content types, more stakeholders, tighter release cycles, and more languages. The result is a mix of stalled automation, awkward workarounds, and the sense that y...

Translation is no longer a single lane that runs through one department. We are watching localization spread into marketing stacks, product releases, support tools, and AI features like chatbots, sometimes without any coordination at all. That shift can feel empowering and fast, but it also creates a new question that companies cannot dodge: who owns quality when everyone can ship multilingual content? We dig into the forces behind “shadow localization,” from executive pressure for velocity ...

Someone on your team ships a translated page overnight, looks like a hero, and nobody filed a localization request. Then you stumble on the copy later and think, “Did we do this?” That moment has a name: shadow localization. We dig into why it shows up even in mature programs, why AI and machine translation make it explode, and why treating it like a turf war is the fastest way to lose trust and relevance. We talk through the real-world patterns: the small team that built a translation workf...