Shadow Localization: A Localization Managers Perspective

Someone on your team ships a translated page overnight, looks like a hero, and nobody filed a localization request. Then you stumble on the copy later and think, “Did we do this?” That moment has a name: shadow localization. We dig into why it shows up even in mature programs, why AI and machine translation make it explode, and why treating it like a turf war is the fastest way to lose trust and relevance.

We talk through the real-world patterns: the small team that built a translation workflow years ago and never connected with localization, the “turnkey” vendor that bundles translation into a project and then asks us to sanity-check the output, and the random discovery of low-quality “translations in the wild” that ignore terminology, brand voice, and basic QA. From there, we share a practical response: reach out with curiosity, run a quick diagnostic, fix what truly needs fixing, and use the moment to onboard teams to better processes, shared SLAs, or volume pricing without forcing one rigid workflow on every use case.

The bigger takeaway is strategic: if we position ourselves as the team that translates, people will assume ChatGPT can replace us. If we position ourselves as the team with international intelligence, market context, and a plan for coherent multilingual experiences, we become essential. Listen, then share this with a localization peer and leave a review if it helps. Where are you seeing shadow localization pop up in your organization?

Transcript

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Welcome And New Series Setup

Stephanie Harris-Yee 0:00

Hello, I'm Stephanie and back for another episode of Field Notes. And this time we're actually going to be starting a new thread in Field Notes with Giulia Greco from Giulia Greco Consulting. And she's going to be approaching things from more of that interpersonal organizational side of things within LOC programs. So super excited to start this new series with her.

Giulia Greco 0:21

Thank you, Stephanie. This is very exciting for me too. I'm thrilled to be participating in this new iteration of Field Notes and grateful for the opportunity. And I think we're going to have some really interesting chats that hopefully can be useful to other localization professionals. So we can take it away with our first topic. All right, let's

What Shadow Localization Looks Like

Giulia Greco 0:41

do it.

Stephanie Harris-Yee 0:41

So this first topic is one that many of you have probably been hearing about or maybe hopefully not experiencing, but it's something we like to call shadow localization. So this is what happens when you're doing your regular localization job, you have a good system in place, and all of a sudden you find out, oh, this other department has spun up their own workflows. Maybe they didn't realize you existed, maybe they just wanted to do their own thing, but now all of a sudden you have two separate workflows happening in the same company. Maybe they're doing great, maybe not. This is a situation. So AI has made translation something that anyone can do now, it seems. So you don't really need a translation team anymore, right?

Giulia Greco 1:28

Well, that's what a lot of people seem to think. People that are not in the localization field, obviously, many people in leadership or other over-eager folks. And sometimes I think, honestly, can you blame them? The barrier to entry into translating has disappeared. But I also want to say something first, because this whole thing of shadow localization existed even before AI, at least in big companies that may have a tendency to be a little bit silosed. There's always like the little team that nobody knows about in an obscure part of the company doing something that kind of flies under the radar, that doesn't really interact with other teams. And they sometimes live under a rock and they just don't know that now there is a localization team. And maybe there wasn't two years ago or five years ago when they were assembled and started doing some work and realized that they needed translations. Maybe there wasn't any infrastructure and no people doing this. So they took matters in their own hands, but they still kept on flying under the radar.

The Patent Team Story Pre-AI

Giulia Greco 2:41

And this actually happened to me in my previous company with the patent team. Nobody knew about it. They were like three people. They had easy access to procurement and legal because of the nature of what they do, clearly, a clear mandate to get it done no matter what. And it one day, I guess one of them talked to somebody else in the company and found out that there was a localization team that was providing translations to the entire company except for them. And they were like, We have a contract for translations with the LSP. So they called me. I sat down, I had a chat, and uh, and I found out that the LSP was a reputable one. I found out about their volumes. I asked them, Do you think you want to come on board and have my team handle your work? Or is this something that you are okay continuing with the way you are? And they were, we don't really know what we don't know. And what I realized was that they could probably benefit from being onboarded to my LSP because I said you can benefit from volume discounts. At this point, you get under the umbrella of our general contract and SLAs, but you can still manage the whole pipeline on your own. Because I think they wanted to maintain independence and the ability of just do things the way they had always done them. Everything worked out. It became a question of can you get a better price if you hop on our bus with this LSP, with whom we have a big contract, versus keep going as a small thing with your own LSP. And that's what they did. I put them in touch directly with my LSP and I said, they're on their own. I don't need to take this on. God knows we have enough work as it is. I'm not looking for more work for me and my team. And they were happy, and then it just became an addendum to our regular contract with the negotiated rates and everything. And Bob's your uncle. Everybody was happy. And this was pre-AI days. So this is just to say that it can happen, it was happening even before, but now it has a bit of a different flavor.

AI Lowers The Translation Barrier

Giulia Greco 4:53

Now it's like teams who are like, oh man, I used to have to go through the localization team and having to fight for budget and make a business case, uh, and now I can just go to ChatGPT and get it translated immediately and move by myself and look like the hero who's shipping stuff, and I don't have to deal with those annoying localization people who are telling me the qualities or tell me that I have to get in line because there's more important things in the queue first. So, this is what I mean when I say can you blame them. The reality is that for a lot of teams, uh, there is a queue. Yeah, translation is not immediate when you're going through a localization team, and sometimes localization people get to hang up on the consistency and the quality conversation without realizing that is of absolutely no interest and no consequence to their interlocutor. And I think that's a conversation that we need to have because if there is shadow localization in your org right now, this is a signal that maybe something needs to change so that it doesn't become more widespread and eventually you end up appearing as irrelevant and not needed. Yeah, that's the number one thing.

Stephanie Harris-Yee 6:13

It sounds like things can come in two ways. So, one, like you mentioned in your previous company, where they actually realize that, oh, there's a localization department now and they'll come to you. And then other cases where you'll go out and you'll say, wait, this suddenly popped up out of nowhere. Here is this thing that's happening. Yeah. And either case, sometimes it'll be working well, sometimes it won't. What does happen if you come across one of those situations where you found someone, they've made this whole system, and it's a mess?

Giulia Greco 6:43

Yeah, so this is the other way, exactly. To your point, you usually find out in two ways that there's shadow localization.

Finding Rogue Workflows In The Wild

Giulia Greco 6:50

Either because somebody contacts you out of the blue and says, Hey, I didn't know you guys existed. We've been doing translations for a while, like that patent team that I just mentioned. Otherwise, you just accidentally, randomly run into some content in the wild, as I like to call it, like translations in the wild. You're like, wait a minute, what is this? Did we do this? This doesn't look like something that we did. And usually it's stuff that attracts your attention because, to my previous point, the quality is not there. And so it's harder to surface, but it does happen quite a bit, and it did happen to me and my team quite a bit. Yeah, it's harder to get to the bottom of it, and it's honestly way more concerning because it is that other aspect of teams who maybe they never came to you, but maybe they did, they tried a few times, and the process felt either too slow for their timeline or somehow it didn't satisfy their needs. And so they ended up building a workaround, and they have no reason to stop unless you give them a reason to stop. So when that happens, if you're able to get to the bottom of it and find the team or the person responsible for this, uh, what I did in the past was just reach out and say, hey, we noticed that you did this translation. Can you tell me more about it? I come from the localization team, so I'm interested in everything multilingual, and I'm curious as to how you guys got this done. Also, just FYI, we noticed that language XYZ has some significant mistakes. There's been other instances where other teams have done localization through a third-party vendor, and so they sell a turnkey type of project where they include translation and make it sounded like it's gonna be so easy, you don't have to worry about a thing. And people that are already overworked and under resourced are like, yeah, okay, sure, sounds good, but they'll take care of it. But then they get a little doubt, and so they may say yes, fully knowing that there is an internal localization team, and then they'll go to the localization team and say, Hey, can you check this? My vendor did it, and we wanna make sure that they did it correctly. And I hated that because that's basically you're getting called in as a cleanup crew, basically. Having said that, it's annoying, but it is an incredible opportunity, just like it's a good opportunity when you find the shadow localization in the wild, because either way, if you are able to establish a connection or if they come to

Turn Cleanup Requests Into Onboarding

Giulia Greco 9:16

you asking to check, this is your opportunity to run a diagnostic and demonstrate your value. And the review usually uncovers problems because of course it does, because there was no style guide, there was no terminology adherence, there were no branded terms. And so usually you can find quite a bit that needs to be changed. So you do it, you fix it, you go back, and you're like, we've done the cleanup, it was quite significant, and here's why. And next time, feel free to just call us, we can do this for you, and it will be done correctly from the get-go. And that starts the conversation as to this is how you contact us. You basically use this as an opportunity to onboard a new team.

Stephanie Harris-Yee 9:56

Yeah. So is that usually the answer then to try to draw them back in and bring it back under the localization team as much as possible? Or is that just a case-by-case thing?

Giulia Greco 10:08

I think it's a case-by-case

When Not Everything Needs Full Loc

Giulia Greco 10:09

thing. Yeah. And that's why I wanted to start this whole conversation with the patent team. Because in that case, I didn't bring them under my umbrella. You don't always want to bring it under it. And this is a little bit uncomfortable because I think it's in localization circles, there's this idea that no, everything has to go through you and centralizing it, not in terms of org, but in terms of all the work needs to flow through you, it's considered the right thing to do. And I'm like, maybe not, maybe not in every situation. Not everything needs the full localization treatment. And so, unless you are incredibly nimble as a team, you can accommodate very different ways of working very quickly, suddenly, because a team that's doing stuff on their own on the side, because it's faster, because they want it immediately, and because maybe they're just translating a landing page that literally will stay online for 48 hours. We had a lot of those in my previous companies, like in country teams that were organizing in real life events in various markets and needed just to throw a landing page up for registration with some information, and then it would come down after a week. Do I really need to get hung up on it needs to be done 100% correctly, or can they just write it on their own? In some cases, it wasn't even localization. It would just get completely created in the local languages from scratch, published, and it's fine. So it's more a question of thinking about in tiers, thinking about what is this content, what is its longevity, what is it supposed to be doing. There are things that obviously you want to be in the driver's seat, but it goes back to like quality tiers that needs to reflect content tiering, right? But it's the same situation. The patent team has something very specific, they know exactly how it needs to be done better than any localization professional on the localization team. They already have a situation where they're getting their needs fulfilled. Do we need to get involved? Not really. There were no complaints, there were no quality issues, it was done to compliance, it was done the way it was supposed to be doing. Fine, get it done. Then you gotta ask yourself, why is it happening? I've always taken any type of initiative like this and any complaint as a flag that something in our setup is not working, something in our setup is leaving someone behind, and we need to figure out how to not leave them behind because otherwise they will find a way that is a different way.

Stephanie Harris-Yee 12:46

So it sounds like there's a couple of different situations. You respond to them on a case by case. How do you take all of these different things? So some you're cleaning up messes, sometimes you're just giving a little bit of advice. How do you organize your response so that at the end of the day you're ending up with a little bit more influence and more visibility than what you started

Build Influence By Being Strategic

Stephanie Harris-Yee 13:10

with?

Giulia Greco 13:10

Yeah, great question. So it is by reframing what your function is. If your localization team is positioned as that team that translates stuff, then of course everyone thinks that they can replace you with ChatGPT or any other AI tool. But if you're positioned as the team that has strategic advice and a strategic point of view on international markets that ensures that international experiences are coherent, they are on brand, and they're effective. Like a team that has like international intelligence that can be deployed and help you be better at what you're trying to do. That's a completely different value proposition that AI can't replicate on its own. Every time you clean up someone else's messes, you're collecting intelligence. You're learning which teams are going international that you didn't know of, what content they're producing, what markets they're targeting. And that's important organizational knowledge that you should have as a localization professional because you can take that to your own leadership and say there are X number of teams across the company doing translation work outside our function and our systems. Here's the quality risk, and here's what I propose. You're not going to your leadership to throw them under the bus and complain. You're complaining that they are being bypassed. You're going to them as a strategic move to present a strategic picture that you can see and nobody else is seeing. So it's an advantage. So the goal is not to control everything, it is to be the person in the company that understands the full picture of how your organization communicates across markets and across languages and across cultures. That is the definition of influence. And ironically, you will get there faster if you help people, no matter what happened and how they came to you, than by gatekeeping them or policing them. Nobody likes to be policed. Yeah.

Stephanie Harris-Yee 15:13

Okay.

Stay Curious And Use The Signal

Stephanie Harris-Yee 15:14

If you had to give someone one thing that you'd want them to take away from this chat, what would it be?

Giulia Greco 15:19

It would be that if someone in your company is localizing without you, don't panic and don't get territorial, get curious instead, and use this as an opportunity to figure out what's happening. Clean up what needs to be cleaned up, be helpful, and use what you learn in this process to make your function definitely more visible and more essential. Yeah, I think that shadow localization is a symptom, not the problem necessarily. And it tells you how your function is perceived. So it's a data point. Use it as a data point and then use it to expand your influence. Okay.

Stephanie Harris-Yee 15:58

Thank you, Giulia. And I'm excited to continue this series. So yeah, we'll talk more next time.

Giulia Greco 16:04

So am I. Thank you so much.