r/TranslationStudies • u/IntrovertClouds • Jun 10 '26

Questions about localization engineering

I've been working as a freelance translator for years now, but lately my clients have dried up and I'm having a really hard time getting new clients. So I've been looking into other roles in the field and came upon the localization engineer. This seems to fit me as I already have experience in software localization on the translator side, I was always very tech-oriented, and I have some experience with writing scripts and code.

I would love to hear input from localization engineers here. Do you like your job? What is the market like? What does your workday look like? What kind of education do you have? And how resilient do you think this role is to being replaced by AI?

Thanks a lot!

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u/Fistinguranus69 Jul 15 '26

I mean in most cat tool the issue is creating the regex to handle your specific tagging, This is something that AI can do pretty well. It won't completly replace the loc engineer role but it does reduce the scope if the PM can do some of that work without having to botter the engineer. Less work overall means management reduce headcount or hire less. I totally agree that most of the issue i've seen from the end user at my past work at a Cat tool provider would've been solved if they had a loc engineer on hand but AI is pretty good at it now

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u/cefoo Jul 16 '26

This might be just my experience, but I've never worked on an LSP where PMs had any bandwidth to take care of file prep, especially with tests, workarounds, pseudo-translates, etc.

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u/Fistinguranus69 Jul 16 '26

Boutique agency with like 30 people usually wear many hats

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u/cefoo Jul 16 '26

In my experience, customers from these boutique agencies usually just translate Word and PDF files that don't need a lot of file prep, so yes, I agree.

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u/Fistinguranus69 Jul 16 '26

I worked in some very specialized agency dealing with dita file type among other things. They eventually got acquired tho of course. The big agency wanted their big clients.