r/localization

Hi,

I run a small localization team at a b2b software company. So far, we've managed to personally see after all the content in our core language pair + farm out 2 other languages to an LSP with our customers paying for it. That has been going on for 2-3 years now.

However, our Sales/CS teams have been putting pressure on us to just implement some garbage Claude implementation so we can offer languages where our customers in these markets don't want to pay for localization. In fact, a high-ranking person from one of those teams just created a respective merge request and told us to implement it, which caused a whole thing. We didn't budge. We met with him and he (someone from a scientific field with no language background) told three translators/localization managers and a technical writer that our work was pretty much low-stakes and AI has gotten so good that we might as well just do it, followed by a bunch of AI cultist nonsense. I know, many of us have heard these kinds of takes before.

Obviously, the burden to come up with a respective process and QA mechanism would be fully on us in this case and of course they haven't thought any of that through and frankly don't care. I'm not even staunchly opposed to AI and think there are intelligent implementations (e. g. review bots based on terminology databases and styleguides), but I'm just fed up with the ignorance.

Anyway, my boss at least pushed back toward the guy and they at least agreed that other departments need to come to us with an issue and requirements so we can see what we want to do about it. So far so good, but when I just met with him, he basically told me about how we need to be open to how AI "can improve our processes" and then went on to suggest a bunch of implementations that would have no QA whatsoever and possible processes that were just as terrible as what that first guy suggested.

Our next steps are to have workshops on strategy and where we want our quality standards to be, which is fine, but honestly, having known my boss for over 5 years, this feels like the beginning of the end. I'm trying to stay open but it sucks because up until recently, my company always seemed like one of the more reasonable ones that don't get mindlessly caught up in this stupid movement. If I leave, I don't think I'll get a more open-minded boss or org than my current one.

Would love some advice on how to deal with this kind of thing.