Mirela
Localization begins with planning. Without it, even the best tools and translators can’t make up for unclear priorities. Planning forces you to ask the right questions up front: Which markets matter most? Who needs to be involved? What systems are required to scale? How will you track cost and impact?
This guide walks you through the key elements of planning for localization: selecting the right markets, assembling the right team, setting up tools and workflows, managing vendors, budgeting, and more.
Define your objectives goes first
All plans start with a clear articulation of objectives, and in this case, you need to set your business goals. These objectives may range from entering a new geographic market to increasing customer retention among a specific demographic. Often, companies pursue localization to drive revenue, improve customer experience, or to meet regulatory requirements. Your objectives serve as the compass for all downstream decisions: budget allocation, timeline management, tool selection, just to name a few.
Read more: How to develop a global expansion strategy
Prioritize the right markets
But where to localize? Don’t rely on assumptions or language statistics; they might not work for you. Analyze your own data. Where are you getting the traffic, signups, or support tickets from non-English speakers? Also keep an eye on your competitors. If they’ve already localized in a region and you haven’t, they’re gaining ground. If they haven’t, you might have a chance to move first (if the demand is there, of course).
But weigh potential challenges against the size and urgency of the opportunity. Because if you’re not ready to meet a country’s legal standards or customer expectations, it’s better to wait. And start small. Choose one or two high-impact markets as test cases. That way, you can refine your localization process before rolling it out at scale.
Tip: One commonly used framework is the market attractiveness vs. competitive strength matrix. It helps assess potential markets based on external opportunity and internal readiness.
- Market Attractiveness considers factors like total addressable market (TAM), language population size, internet penetration, GDP per capita, regulatory environment, and cultural affinity for your product category.
- Competitive Strength evaluates how well your product fits the local need, brand awareness, operational capacity, and ease of localization.
Read more: Multilingual market research
Assemble a good team
You can’t do localization without the right professionals. And it’s not a task you can hand off to a single translator. You need a localization manager to oversee the initiative, ensuring alignment between business objectives and execution. They must work closely with product managers, engineers, marketers, designers, legal advisors, and linguists.
Read more: Building your localization team
Content audit and preparation
Before you begin localization, the source content must be audited and prepared. This step is important for ensuring consistency and scalability. Speaking of consistency, it’s advisable to create a style guide and glossary of key terms to maintain coherence in translated materials. Structured content management, using tools that support content reuse and modularity, can significantly streamline this phase.
Moreover, content should be prioritized, because not everything needs immediate localization. Core user-facing materials like the product interface, help center articles, and onboarding flows usually warrant early attention. On the other hand, you could keep lower-priority assets like blog posts or white papers for later, if you can’t afford the costs.
Read more: How to perform a content localization audit
Internationalization
Internationalization is the process of designing software so that it can be easily adapted to different languages and regions without requiring engineering changes. It’s about making sure that the UI elements can accommodate text expansion, dates and currencies are formatted dynamically, and content strings are externalized from code.
If you don’t internationalize properly, you risk last-minute delays, as engineering teams scramble to refactor core systems. Thus, internationalization must be treated as a prerequisite, not an afterthought. It’s best addressed during early development cycles and continually revisited as the product evolves.
Additionally, planning for localization should account for localization testing. This involves both linguistic validation (ensuring that translations are accurate and contextually appropriate) and functional testing (verifying that the software behaves correctly in localized environments).
Read more: 15 Internationalization best practices
Search for the right tools
How are you going to handle localization? With the right tools, of course. Here are some of the common tools used in localization:
- Internationalization tools
- Translation management systems
- Computer-Assisted Translation tools
- Terminology management systems
- Quality Assurance tools
Internationalization tools are needed before localization even begins. But translation management systems are the foundation of localization setups. They help centralize workflows, maintain translation memory, and integrate directly with content repositories or CI/CD pipelines. When choosing a TMS, consider factors like scalability, API support, integration with design and development tools, and support for continuous localization.
Computer-Assisted Translation tools help translators work more efficiently. They highlight repeated content, suggest previous translations, and enforce consistency across projects. This speeds up translation while reducing cost and error rates.
To check for issues such as untranslated strings, placeholder mismatches, text overflows, and formatting errors, Quality Assurance tools are used. Some platforms automate these checks during file submission, while others run validations post-translation. When you combine QA tools with linguistic review, you’re ensuring both technical and language quality.
Read more: 7 Localization tools you need in your kit
Budgeting
If you’re localizing a lot of content, it can be a serious investment so you shouldn’t underestimate the costs. You have to think of the full lifecycle of localization, from planning to maintenance. Translation itself is typically priced per word, but that’s only part of the picture. You’ll also need to budget for review cycles, project management (either internal or via a vendor), style guide development, and any custom engineering required to support internationalization.
The languages you choose affect the budget too. Localizing into German or Spanish is less costly than Japanese, Korean, or Arabic, which may require extensive adaptation, right-to-left support, or extra review cycles. Legal or regulated content also tends to require more rounds of approval, and all this drives up time and cost.
Read more: Factors that influence localization cost
Final thoughts
When you’re planning for localization, you have to define clear objectives up front in order to set the direction for every subsequent decision. And when you map out your market selection criteria, assemble a cross-functional team, and establish internationalization-ready workflows and tools, you transform localization into a proactive process.