r/localization

I own a small translation agency that I bought a few years ago from a retiring owner. I became comfortable with steady orders from the 3 customers who had been working with the company for a long time. I can tell you that they are not ordering as much now. We do only 5 languages, I have not done sales before. How do I find customers? Can you give me some tips? I want to grow my business. God bless.

We have an Android app that has been translated into 20 languages. How do you check that all strings are rendered properly (no ugly layout shifts bc of line breaks, correct positioning) in all languages?
Do you know tools that can automate this work, especially when strings change and screens need to be checked again in all languages? How do you keep track of which screens changed and need another QA screening?
My current idea would be to do this with AI somehow. Supply the original screenshot, the translated screenshot and prompt AI something along the lines of "Please compare original and translated screens, do you see any formatting or design issues? Do strings match the content?"

Hey everyone! I majored in English to Spanish Translation at a Spanish university. Then I worked for 5 years as a video game localizer (translator) in Madrid until 2024, when I moved to the US with my wife and joined your typical AI company. My current position is Red-Teaming Specialist (AI Cybersecurity).

I don't hate my job, but my company doesn't offer salary growth and I’m trying to figure out how to pivot into higher-paying roles *w*ithout going into management or public-speaking-heavy jobs.

I'm willing to study something, of course. The first idea that crosses my mind is coding, which is more related to game localization, but when I search for "Spanish localization" jobs, I don't really find much. Another option is freelance translation, I guess.

Any ideas? Thank you guys.

I wasn't able to attend this year. Anyone there? How is it? Heard anything interesting?

TL;DR: Building an AI-assisted localization testing solution for multilingual help pages. I can automate content extraction and reporting, but I'm looking for ideas on the best way to compare English and Chinese (or any language per day) content using AI and identify localization issues accurately.

AI-Based Localization Testing: How Would You Approach Semantic Comparison Between English and Chinese Content?

Hello everyone,

I'm working on a localization testing solution for a web application that has help/documentation pages available in multiple languages (currently English Chinese Fresh etc..).

The goal is to automatically detect localization issues and generate a report.

I've broken the problem into three parts:

Part 1 – Content Extraction (Completed)

For every page in the portal:

Navigate to the corresponding help page.

Extract all visible text from the English version.

Extract all visible text from the Chinese version.

Store each page's content as separate text files in language-specific folders.

Example:

English/ ├── page1.txt ├── page2.txt Chinese/ ├── page1.txt ├── page2.txt

Part 2 – AI-Based Localization Validation (Need Guidance)

For each page, I want to feed:

English content

Chinese content

into an AI system and have it identify:

Missing translations

Incorrect translations

Partially translated content

Additional/unexpected content

Semantic mismatches

Terminology inconsistencies

The challenge is that I don't want simple string matching. I want to validate whether both versions convey the same meaning.

Part 3 – Reporting (Can Handle)

Once issues are identified, I can generate reports with:

Page name

Issue type

Severity

English text

Chinese text

Suggested fix (optional)

My Questions

How would you approach Part 2?

Would you use:

LLMs (GPT, Claude, Gemini, etc.)

Embeddings + similarity scoring

Translation + comparison

Some hybrid approach

How would you handle large help pages that may exceed context limits?

Has anyone implemented something similar in a localization QA/testing workflow?

I'm interested in both practical implementations and architecture suggestions.

Thanks!

I've been working as a freelance translator for years now, but lately my clients have dried up and I'm having a really hard time getting new clients. So I've been looking into other roles in the field and came upon the localization engineer. This seems to fit me as I already have experience in software localization on the translator side, I was always very tech-oriented, and I have some experience with writing scripts and code.

I would love to hear input from localization engineers here. Do you like your job? What is the market like? What does your workday look like? What kind of education do you have? And how resilient do you think this role is to being replaced by AI?

Thanks a lot!