We have our hands full for the foreseeable future, and I’m not necessarily referring to generative AI. You could say the abundance of work and challenges to solve is just business as usual — a cliché, sure — but something I believe we’re accustomed to all too well in the localization space. The “we” might also include the entire language industry, although in this case, I’m referring to the Documentation and Language Services team I’m leading at Emerson’s Testing and Measurement (T&M) Business Unit. 

It’s true — we have our hands in many pots, and our work influences many aspects of the global organization, from sales to marketing to R&D and product development to post-sales… But if that weren’t the case, what space and opportunities would there be for growth?

I want to share a recent transformation we’ve been going through inside the company. From the outside, no one is the wiser, but the point of sharing what we’re working on is also to show that while the world is busy with all things AI, there will be companies at different stages of their trajectory. Some face more “mundane” challenges, although no less complex, that require all of our accumulated experience to get right. Some business challenges don’t go out of fashion, and you must react proactively as you would to the latest shiny toy (you know the one I’m referring to).

The scenario

Transformation is familiar to anyone working in localization. There is a sense of progression to our work, creating, transforming, and optimizing content in varied forms. We never remain idle. This progression often parallels or mirrors the company’s growth and evolution. 

You have a company that decides to expand internationally, and almost from one day to the next, a group of people is onboarded to take care of this thing called localization. Then there is the case of a company being acquired by another — and the work to align and streamline language-related activities between sister teams. This is our starting point. After being acquired by Emerson, our team at NI worked with a one-year timeline to restructure localization activities and build twin centers of excellence in Hungary and Malaysia, quite far from the original one in Austin, but both locations where NI has existing talent and infrastructure. How do you go about (re)building a team?

How to own the challenge

There is no secret formula to making this kind of transformation while ensuring business continuity (you have to keep delivering the work) and devising it in a way that sticks in the long run (which is absolutely a consideration). It’s also not necessarily novel — others have gone through this scenario. It requires following change management best practices and working with many stakeholders for alignment, from the C-suite to HR to onsite leadership and existing teams, as well as leveraging existing infrastructure, sourcing talent, and building the team. 

You also don’t lift the anchor and move an entire localization operation from one day to the next. Right now, we are at a point where we can safely flip the switch and rebuild operations on a different continent. But there’s been a lot of prep work, standardization, and knowledge gathering leading to this. We’ve built a system that is not talent- or individual-dependent. We went from an unnecessarily complex system where we relied on people who had the knowledge of how to run things in their heads to a more streamlined operation. In the past, whenever we lost talent, we realized we were overstaffed, so one of the most significant changes has been going from throwing people at a problem to rethinking the system. Again, not necessarily novel. But this is our testimony of how you need to evolve to continue meeting the organization’s demands — and I think adapting to changing circumstances is very topical for many of us at the moment. 

Innovation is a question of priorities

Sourcing talent is an evergreen challenge for localization and globalization teams. With the industry going through different stages of AI discovery and adoption and everyone hunting for AI-ready talent, it has stood out in even starker contrast. Sure, there are creative ways of reaching the right people (relying on your network and peers for referrals is one), but it still takes time. Then, you add the challenge of working in locations where localization-savvy folks are not readily available. One of our first challenges has been to help our leadership understand that you cannot recruit very pointed profiles, like a Japanese technical translator, in Debrecen, Hungary, where the talent pool for this skillset is limited. This contrasts with our previous setup, where all specialist roles were in-house in Austin. There are no magic solutions to finding local talent, so we decided to split our team between Hungary and Malaysia, where the company has another existing hub, to tap into existing infrastructure and teams for ad-hoc support. For example, engineering help is easier to obtain in Malaysia, and it’s also a geographically close spot to source translation and localization for the Asian region. Once we establish where to get the talent, the second big question is how do you onboard them? We’re going the hybrid route — having everyone physically present is no longer possible nowadays, and both sides (employer and employee) need to weigh the associated costs.

There is substantial debate in the industry about how the roles and responsibilities of people in the localization chain will evolve, especially under the influence of AI. It’s tempting to go all-in on innovation and think about all the new roles we can create, but I find working with what you have and adapting existing skills is a much more efficient route for now. Innovation is a function of your priorities and the resources you have at your disposal. In a company such as ours, where we’ve been accustomed to doing things a certain way for a long time, there is a novelty in revamping the process from an in-house team to a combination of in-house specialists and external partners. More creativity is not necessarily needed at this point, but as we move forward and make this change stick, there will come a time for experimentation and, who knows, maybe reinventing the wheel.

The evolution of our roles

Determining our priorities and doggedly pursuing them doesn’t mean we lack ideas. Our industry does a good job of exposing us to our peers’ ideas and ways of doing things. One observation is that the specific context of the company and the localization teams play a big role in shaping your trajectory. In the past, when I was leading teams at different companies, I missed opportunities to branch out into content creation because I didn’t see how content creation went hand in hand with content transformation (i.e., localization). Our team at T&M BU at Emerson sits in R&D, at the heart of product development, so these functions are very closely related. Going from localization to documentation and expanding our activities is a natural evolution for language operations, even though it is very specific to us.

You also see an evolution underway at other companies, with less traditional work and more governance tasks (whether content quality governance or data governance) appearing on the menu for localization and globalization teams. For example, we’re pursuing the idea of separating the process of content creation from content health and optimization. We already have technical writers, but this raises the question of whether we need technical editors who are more focused on the architecture of the content, its taxonomy, and classification in the name of optimization.

The last two years show us that circumstances can change fast. Anyone going through an acquisition as we did has a lot of opportunities to influence how localization is done. This works the other way too — when you’re acquiring companies, you have a lot of opportunities to mix it up or to expand the portfolio of services your team offers to the organization. I frequently encounter the question, “So what did you do?” and the answer is simple: A lot of proactive reaching out to learn from stakeholders at Emerson who had a hand in translation, despite latent fears about what these conversations could mean for our team. We seized the initiative, and it was the right thing to do. The business transformation still went through, despite our fears, but there is a huge opportunity in it too. Enterprise-level localization at Emerson is still changing, but by changing our attitudes and embracing transformation we let the organization know what our team is doing. 

We created an opportunity while things changed quickly. When you see an opportunity like this, what you do to seize it will make all the difference.