From cut-and-paste chaos to global growth: 8 marketing translation tips from high-performing teams

Suppose you work in marketing in the UK right now. If that’s the case, this might sound familiar: Your budget hasn’t increased, but your growth targets absolutely have, and somehow you are meant to deliver more translations, in more markets, with the same pot of money.

In our recent three-part webinar series on marketing translation, we looked at how teams are breaking out of that trap. The most successful ones aren’t just “doing more translation”. They’re quietly rebuilding localisation within their marketing operation, using a mix of content strategy, translation technology, and continuous localisation to save budget while supporting growth.

I’ve written this article to pull the learnings from those three webinars together into one place. You’ll discover eight things high-performing teams do differently when it comes to running a translation program that delivers the very best ROI.

The goal is simple: Help you move from cut-and-paste chaos to a localisation engine that saves money, protects your brand, and actually helps you grow internationally.

Most teams do not realise how expensive their current localisation habits are. Day to day, it just feels “busy”.

If you zoom out, you usually see the same picture:

• Content copied out of your CMS, PIM, email platform or design tools into spreadsheets
• Files passed around on email with names like “Final_V7_USE_THIS_ONE”
• Local teams are fixing issues themselves because they do not fully trust the output
• Every multilingual campaign is treated as a one-off project, even if 80% of it already exists

High-performing translation teams begin by acknowledging that this is not just messy, it is a cost problem. They take one or two key journeys, such as publishing a new product campaign or rolling out lifecycle emails in multiple languages, and map what really happens.

That map is not for decoration. It shows where time and money leak away, where you might be struggling with your tech stack, or where ownership is unclear. It also gives you the evidence you need to make a case for changing how localisation sits inside your marketing stack.

Once you’ve seen the chaos, the next step is to accept that not every asset deserves the same translation treatment.

In the first webinar, we discussed a simple reality: every piece of content has a different ROI for your business. Some pages and campaigns directly drive revenue or retention; others are nice-to-have.

High-performing teams stop guessing and start asking structured questions:

• How big is the audience for this content in each language?
• Is this a core market or more of a long-tail opportunity?
• Is this a top- traffic page or a long-tail SEO piece that gets a handful of visits?
• How close is this asset to revenue, for example, checkout flow versus a generic brand article?
• How sensitive is the content and channel, for example, a high-visibility brand campaign versus a low open rate email?

In this clip from the series, I talk through the questions we use in that framework and how they help you decide where premium translation is worth the spend, and where “good enough” really is.

Not all content deserves the same translation budget. Watch how to build a simple framework that matches effort to impact.

Once you start looking at content through this lens, two things happen:. You stop overspending on low-impact assets and reallocate the budget to support content that genuinely drives growth.

The content framework only becomes useful when it drives concrete workflow decisions, and that’s where translation service levels come in.

In the webinars, we discussed three core options that most teams work with:

• AI only = Fastest and lowest cost, suitable for low-risk, internal or exploratory content
• AI plus post editing, either via MTAP (machine translation combined with automated post-editing) or MTPE (human post-editing) = Strong balance of quality, speed and cost for the bulk of marketing assets
• Fully human translation = slower and higher cost, but essential for sensitive, creative or heavily regulated content

Hybrid approaches such as MTAP and Pronto (our self-service AI translation tool) are particularly powerful in helping brands scale faster while keeping quality high, as I explain in this snippet from our webinar:

If you’re not using a hybrid approach to translation yet, workflows like MTAP (Machine translation with automated post-editing) are a great way to keep costs down without compromising on translation accuracy.

As with any piece of technology, it’s only as good as the person who’s using it.

We’ve run whole webinars on this, as it’s still easy to underestimate the ways professional linguists add value to AI-enabled processes. Without their input, if you used a plug-and-play tool to dub a video or add AI-generated subtitles, here are just a few of the things that could go wrong:

• Translation of names or companies that you usually wouldn’t translate (my name, James “Brown”, is an excellent example of this!)
• Getting numbers wrong (e.g. 1.5cm should be “1,5 cm” in Spanish)
• Inconsistency of terms (translating “glasses” as reading glasses in one sentence, then drinking glasses in the next)
• Pronunciation
• Mis-timings so that the words don’t match the visuals

For a mission-critical piece of video content that you’re going to get a lot of use out of, it’s 100% recommended to work with a professional linguist or translation team to oversee the project for you; their expertise will save you time, money and get you a bigger bang for your buck.

AI tools can generate voices, but linguists make them believable. From pronunciation to brand tone, learn how humans ensure your multilingual videos sound authentic.

Fast-moving teams don’t let localisation sit on the edge of the operation as a purely manual process. They build a single, consistent workflow and run everything through it, where the real cost and time savings begin to show.

Copy-and-paste chaos is rarely a skills problem; it’s almost always a technology problem.

The teams that move past it use translation connectors and integration to link their platforms directly to their translation technology and providers. That usually covers:

• Content management systems such as WordPress, Sitecore or Adobe Experience Manager
• eCommerce platforms like Shopify, Magento or BigCommerce
• PIM and DAM tools that hold product information and assets
• Email and marketing automation platforms such as HubSpot or Salesforce Marketing Cloud
• Collaboration, tracking and file-sharing tools used by the wider team

The result is no more spreadsheet exports, fewer file versions, less risk of someone overwriting copy in the wrong language, and a lot of hours given back to your team each month.

Traditional localisation tends to happen in big batches, usually at the end of a project when everyone is already under pressure. That process is expensive and super stressful; something I’m sure we can all attest to!

Continuous localisation turns that on its head. Instead of waiting until the end, translation is plugged into your other workflows and runs in smaller, regular cycles. 

Content is updated and localised in parallel with your main work, not weeks later.

In the third webinar, we looked at five key benefits that kick in once continuous localisation is live.

Here, I explain the five benefits of continuous localisation, from faster delivery and fewer errors to better visibility into costs and performance.

These benefits link directly to cost savings and growth, since you’ll be:

• More efficient, because manual exporting and importing are removed from the process
• More accurate, because there are far fewer human errors with files and versions
• Faster to market, because you can launch campaigns and product updates simultaneously across regions
• More consistent, because there is one agreed-upon process rather than a different workaround in each team
• Better able to track projects, because you can see progress, cost and savings in real time

It’s more of a philosophical approach than anything else; translation’s version of “agile development”. It’s putting localisation front and centre in your growth plan, not treating translation as an afterthought.

One of the easiest ways to waste money is to roll out a new localisation workflow across all markets without really testing it.

Our best-performing clients always run structured pilots designed to answer a simple question: “Does this actually work for us?”

A good pilot usually includes:

• A small but representative mix of content, from high-impact sales pages to medium-impact nurture content
• Two or three markets with different language combinations and levels of complexity
• Clear scoring for accuracy, tone of voice, glossary adherence and layout
• Feedback from local stakeholders and brand or legal teams
• A comparison of costs and turnaround times against the old approach

The aim is to prove that your new translation technology and workflow are robust and to gather real numbers you can take to Finance, Operations, and the CMO to justify a wider rollout.

Once you have that evidence, scaling feels much less risky.

You can have the best model on paper, but your results still depend on who’s helping you run it.

Like with any agency support, you should be very deliberate in choosing your localisation partner. Look for people who:

• Understand marketing strategy, brand and campaign realities as well as languages.
• Offer a full range of AI-powered translation tools, from traditional MT through to MTAP and AI copy creation, alongside traditional human translation and transcreation solutions, so you can outsource all content to one team.
• Provide integrations and connectors so localisation fits neatly into your CMS, eCommerce and marketing platforms.
• Keep experienced linguists involved at every level, shaping glossaries, style guides and prompts, not just fixing mistakes at the end.
• Act as both a technology adviser and a service provider, so you don’t get locked into a single tool or approach.

That combination of brilliant humans and cutting-edge technology is what turns localisation into something that quietly turbo-charges your strategy rather than constantly fighting it.

So, where to start?

If you’re struggling with translation chaos in your own setup, a good first move is to pick one content journey. 

First, map it properly, and see where translation technology, AI, and continuous localisation could remove the friction and reduce the cost of the process. 

From there, it becomes much easier to build a case for investing in a more scalable localisation setup that supports your marketing goals in every market.

And if we can help, please get in touch! We can offer a free trial of our MTAP technology via our self-service tool, Pronto. We can also provide advice on where automation might help you move faster and for less money, or run a quick quote for a translation project.