The Hard Parts of Software Localization

Source: Dev.to

Localization is rarely just translation. Once you support more than one language, every UI change needs extra care. Translators need context, placeholders must stay correct, the UI must handle longer text, and reviews have to happen on time so releases do not slip. Small issues are easy to miss and they often show up late, when fixes are more expensive.

In my experience, the hardest part is making localization a normal part of how you build and ship product. This post covers the problems that most often waste time on multilingual projects, and the practices that help teams ship with fewer surprises.

Collaboration

Collaboration matters in every software team, but localization raises the bar. You are coordinating across roles and often across time zones, and small delays or unclear decisions quickly turn into churn. When ownership is fuzzy, the same strings get rewritten multiple times, decisions get reopened in every review, and it becomes hard to tell what is actually ready to ship.

Here are two collaboration problems that show up again and again in localization work.

1. No shared plan up front

Design may be optimizing for tone and UI fit, engineering may be optimizing for implementation and reuse, and translators are left guessing what you really want. The result is predictable: re‑translation, long review threads, and inconsistent wording.

What helps is aligning before translation starts. Make these decisions explicit:

• Tone and voice (formal vs. informal, friendly vs. technical)
• Key terminology (feature names and product concepts)
• UI constraints (where the text appears, whether it can wrap, max length when it matters)
• Final approval (PM, design, or a localization manager)

You will still iterate, but having a shared direction removes most of the avoidable rework.

2. A workflow that is either missing or too heavy

Without a clear workflow, basic questions are hard to answer: what is translated, what changed, what is blocked, and who signs off? With an overly strict workflow, localization becomes a gate for every small change.

What helps is a simple flow that everyone can follow and automate over time:

1. Strings added or changed
2. Translators notified
3. Translation
4. Review
5. Localization QA
6. Release

Translation errors

Even with strong translators and solid processes, issues will happen. The tricky part is that many of them are not “wrong language” problems. They are integration problems: the text is correct on its own, but wrong for the UI, the feature, or the formatting rules your app expects. The most common ones I see fall into five buckets.

1. Translation without context

How you hand off strings matters. If translators only see a CSV with isolated text, they are forced to guess things like:

• Where the string is used (button, title, tooltip, validation error)
• What the feature actually does
• What tone you want (formal vs. casual)
• What placeholders mean and how they behave ({count}, %s, {name})

That guesswork turns into back‑and‑forth, re‑translation, and inconsistent wording.

What helps is shipping context with the strings. If you can, use a TMS that supports:

• Per‑string descriptions or developer notes
• Screenshots or UI previews
• Glossary and approved terminology
• Translation memory and a review step

There are plenty of tools that can handle this. What matters is choosing one that centralizes your localization work and makes collaboration easy, with strings, context, and reviews all in the same place. Localizely worked well for me, but any tool that supports that workflow will do.

2. Syntax and formatting errors (ICU, plurals, placeholders)

ICU message format and placeholders are easy to break. One missing brace or a renamed token can result in raw {count} showing up in production, or in the worst case a runtime error.

What helps is catching these failures before they ship:

• Validate ICU syntax and placeholders early
• Make placeholder mismatches a hard error
• Use a platform or tooling that enforces plural rules and required variables

3. Text that does not fit the UI

Text length varies a lot by language. What fits nicely in English often overflows in German or French, causing truncation, overlapping elements, or awkward wrapping if the layout is tight.

What helps:

• Tell translators when length matters and what the constraint is
• Allow shorter alternatives for buttons and nav items
• Keep notes next to the string, e.g., “button label, max 12 chars”
• Run pseudo‑localization and screenshot‑based UI checks when possible

Many TMSs help here too by storing notes and flagging strings that exceed a character limit.

4. Hard‑coded text that never reaches translators

This is the classic “mostly localized” product problem: one screen is still in English, an email template is unlocalized, or a banner image contains text in the wrong language. It usually happens because the text lives outside your normal string pipeline.

Common places strings get missed:

• Code constants and shared UI components
• Images and banners
• PDFs
• Emails
• Push notifications
• Backend error messages that end up in the UI

What helps is treating this as a QA checklist item and auditing all user‑facing surfaces, not just the app UI.

5. Keeping terminology consistent across the product

Users notice inconsistency more than minor grammar mistakes. If “Workspace” is translated three different ways across the UI, onboarding, and docs, the product feels unpolished.

What helps:

• Maintain a glossary or termbase for key concepts
• Use translation memory plus a real review step
• Decide who owns terminology so decisions do not get relitigated every release

Consistency builds trust and reduces cognitive load, especially in complex products.

SEO issues

(Content for this section was truncated in the original snippet. Add the relevant points about localized URLs, meta tags, hreflang, and sitemap handling here.)

Technical SEO for Localization

Localization is not only a content task; it is also a technical SEO project. A common failure mode is translating pages but not giving search engines the right structure and signals to index each locale correctly. The result can be duplicated content, the wrong language ranking in the wrong country, or localized pages that never get discovered.

What helps

• Pick a URL strategy and stick to it, for example /de/ or de.example.com.
• Implement hreflang so Google knows which locale to serve to which users.
• Do not serve multiple languages from the same URL based on headers or cookies. It is hard to crawl and easy to mis‑index.
• Localize titles, descriptions, and structured data, and do keyword research per locale. Direct translation often misses what people actually search for in that market.

Difficulty Measuring Localization ROI

Localization usually pays off, but proving it with data can be harder than expected. The main issue is attribution: localization affects acquisition, activation, and conversion indirectly, and the impact often shows up weeks or months later.

What helps

• Define success metrics per locale upfront and make sure tracking supports them. Look at locale‑specific landing pages, funnels, events, plus qualitative signals like heatmaps and session recordings.
• Roll out in a controlled way when you can. Start with one market, compare cohorts before and after, or run geographic experiments.
• Treat localization like a product investment. Forecast expected upside, measure leading indicators like traffic and sign‑ups early, and accept that revenue lift may lag behind.

Conclusion

Localization is hard not because translating text is hard, but because it cuts across the entire product. It shows up in engineering and build pipelines, design and layout, product decisions, QA, release management, SEO, and even how you measure success. The problems that cost the most time are usually avoidable ones: missing context, unclear ownership, fragile string formatting, UI constraints, and trying to keep quality high without slowing down shipping.

What has worked most consistently for me is treating localization as an ongoing system, not a one‑off project. That means:

• Clear responsibilities
• A workflow that is lightweight but real
• Early validation for ICU and placeholders
• Reliable localization QA
• Shared rules for tone and terminology

With those basics in place, adding a new language becomes a repeatable process instead of a fire drill.

Hope this helps you avoid some of the common traps and ship multilingual features with fewer surprises.