While translation challenges focus on linguistic and cultural barriers, l10n problems stem from workflow breakdowns, technical integration failures, and coordination gaps that can derail entire projects.
Most companies entering a new market assume that having good translators solves their localization needs. The reality is that even perfect translations can fail spectacularly when your localization process breaks down. Technical issues with character encoding, coordination problems between your translation team and developers, and automation workflows that suddenly stop working can turn a smooth international launch into a costly disaster.
I covered the linguistic side of these challenges in my posts on common translation problems and the reasons why things get lost in translation, but localization workflow issues deserve separate attention. They often surface late in projects when fixing them becomes expensive and time-consuming.
Here are the 12 most common localization problems that can hurt your project workflow, and what you can do to prevent them from sabotaging your internationalization plans.
Technical Localization Problems That Break Your Workflow
Content Rendering and Encoding Problems
Character encoding issues top the list of technical problems that can hurt your localization efforts. When your translation management system can’t properly handle UTF-8 encoding for different locales, you end up with garbled text that makes your localized content completely unusable. This becomes especially problematic when working with right-to-left languages like Hebrew, where the entire interface layout needs to flip direction.
Font rendering creates another layer of technical headaches. Your software might look perfect in English, but when you localize for markets that use complex scripts like Thai or Hindi, suddenly half your interface becomes illegible because your chosen fonts don’t support those character sets. Even worse, some fonts that claim to support multiple languages actually have inconsistent spacing or alignment that breaks your carefully designed layouts.
System and Toolchain Failures
Translation management systems often promise seamless integration with your existing workflow, but the reality is messier. Your TMS might export files in a format that your development team can’t easily import, or it strips out crucial formatting that your developers then have to manually restore. These integration gaps create bottlenecks where your translation team finishes their work, but your developers can’t actually implement it without significant rework.
Placeholder text and notification handling present ongoing technical challenges in software localization. Your app could work perfectly when displaying “Welcome, John!” in English, yet get distorted when that same notification needs to display a longer greeting. These problems multiply when your localization tool doesn’t properly handle dynamic content or variables within your user interface strings.
File format compatibility issues between different localization tools can bring your entire workflow to a halt. Your translators might be working in one translation memory format while your localization platform expects something completely different. When these systems can’t talk to each other, you lose translation memory benefits and end up paying to translate the same content multiple times.
Version control, too, can get hairy when translation updates don’t sync properly with your development workflow. If your translation team is working on an outdated version of your source files while your developers continue adding new features, this creates merge conflicts that require manual resolution and can thus delay your launch timeline.
Team Coordination and Process Breakdowns
Team and Skill-Related Breakdowns
Translation team miscommunication creates some of the most frustrating workflow problems in localization projects. When multiple translators work on the same project without proper terminology coordination, you end up with inconsistent language that confuses users. Your login button might say “Sign In” on one page and “Log In” on another, simply because different team members made different choices and no one caught the inconsistency until it went live.
Localization tool training gaps slow down every aspect of your workflow. Translators are experts in their languages, but can still struggle with your chosen translation platform. This can lead to formatting errors, missed deadlines, and quality issues that require expensive rework. Meanwhile, your project managers spend more time troubleshooting tool problems than actually managing the localization process.
Quality control handoff failures happen when responsibilities between teams aren’t clearly defined. Your translation team delivers their work, but if no one knows who’s supposed to review the localized content in context, test it with actual users, or verify that cultural adaptations make sense for your target market, that’s a big issue. These gaps mean problems only surface after launch, when fixing them requires emergency patches and potentially damages your brand reputation.
Other Localization Problems: Operational and Planning Failures
Timeline coordination between developers, language service vendors and individual translators creates gridlocks, too. Your development team needs final translations to complete their work, but your translation team has to have stable source content to deliver accurate results. When these timelines don’t align properly, everyone ends up rushing their work, which compromises both translation quality and technical implementation.
Resource bottlenecks during localization sprints can derail even well-planned projects. Even if your translation team has capacity for steady work throughout a project, when everything gets compressed into the final weeks before launch, you could suddenly need three times as many linguists as usual. These last-minute resource crunches lead to quality compromises and missed deadlines that could have been avoided with better workflow planning.
Finally, automation workflow setup errors create problems that compound over time. Your localization platform can be configured to automatically send new content for translation, but if the automation rules aren’t set up correctly, important updates get missed while low-priority content gets rushed through the system. When such configuration problems go unnoticed, they cause delays or quality issues.
Get in touch for an audit of your localization workflow!
The common thread in all of these localization problems is that they’re preventable with better workflow planning and team coordination. Many small and medium-sized businesses focus heavily on translation quality while ignoring the operational infrastructure needed to deliver that quality at scale. When your workflows break down, even the best translations become worthless if they can’t be properly implemented, coordinated, or maintained across your international markets.
