Business units unified
Languages
Challenge
Five teams, five ways of doing localization.
Content spanned firmware, the mobile app, voice commands, the website, and technical publications, plus a growing energy products line, in as many as 29 languages.
Each business unit had built its own tools, workflows, and supplier relationships over time, so quality, terminology, and vendor oversight looked different from team to team.
The client needed one localization operating model that could support all of these functions without slowing down releases or diluting the brand.
Stakeholders spanned product engineering, marketing, technical publications, the energy division, and the localization program team, each running on its own cadence.
Approach
One governance layer, built to flex.
A single operating model - One governance framework now spans all four business units. It standardizes quality control, terminology management, linguistic asset ownership, and vendor oversight, so every team works from the same source of truth.
Workflows matched to risk - Not every string carries the same risk. Machine translation with post-editing covers routine content, a review pass gets added where the stakes are higher, and full human translation with review handles anything customer-facing or safety-related. The tier is set by content type, not by habit.
Delivery through existing tools - Smartling TMS and Trados Enterprise both stay in place. Each team keeps the toolchain it already knows, while a shared layer of quality controls and reporting runs underneath both.
Program infrastructure that stays involved - Embedded program managers, language-specific teams, and quality governance leads keep watching how the workflows perform and adjust them as content volume and business needs shift.
Outcomes
A governed model, not a slower one.
Shared linguistic assets - One translation memory and terminology set replaced four separate vendor relationships, cutting duplicated spend across business units.
Consistent brand voice - Firmware strings, marketing copy, technical documentation, and energy product content now read like one brand instead of four.
No slower firmware releases - Firmware still ships on its usual cadence. None of the quality gates or cross-business-unit governance commitments got in the way.
Local flexibility, shared infrastructure - Each business unit keeps the workflow choices it had before, now backed by one governed quality layer instead of five disconnected ones.
Business units unified
Languages
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