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When we first published this post a decade ago, the language business looked a lot different than it does today. Machine translation existed but most programs still ran on human translation, priced by the word, delivered by specialists who knew their subject matter. The per-word rate was a reasonable proxy for what a project would […]

For two years the industry has obsessed over models, prompts, and fine-tuning, and that work has paid off: content generation is faster, more fluent, and more scalable than ever. But teams keep hitting a ceiling. The output passes every linguistic quality check, yet how it actually performs across markets stays unpredictable, sometimes better than expected, […]

In June, the Argos team was present for the 55th LocWorld conference in Dublin — the European city famously responsible for kickstarting many localization careers. As has become our custom, we packed chocolate, we booked the best baristas to keep everyone at the top of their game, and we took part in the conference program. […]

For decades, localization has relied on subject-matter experts—also called SMEs—to review translations and make sure they’re right. They also produce content, answer questions, and define terminology so we know how something should be expressed. Using localization SMEs effectively is harder than it looks, whether those SMEs are specialized linguists with years of knowledge in a […]

A confusing message is circulating about the economics of AI. One camp insists that hiring back a junior engineer is now cheaper than using AI to build things; another insists it has never been cheaper to dig in and build apps yourself, no external teams required. Both claims can be true at once. Tokens are […]

If your engineering team ships on a continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD) cadence, your localization program cannot run on quarterly batch handoffs. Every merged pull request can introduce or change user-facing strings, and a workflow that waits for a manual export, an email to a vendor, and a two-week turnaround will either block your […]

Why “ROI” still trips up SaaS localization teams For years, localization teams have been stuck in an awkward conversation with their CFOs. The CFO wants a clean ROI number. The localization lead has cost-per-word data, throughput rates, and a gut feeling that the German launch went well. The two don’t meet in the middle. As […]