These past two years, I’ve been writing a lot about the friction that slows translation down.
Hidden speed problems. Bottlenecks created by the source content. The tension between moving fast and maintaining quality.
These are real problems. But writing about them made me think about the point that’s important yet under appreciated.
Most of that friction doesn’t come from bad habits or unclear processes. It comes from something more structural: translation has no real home in most marketing teams.
Not a dedicated place. Not a shared environment. Just a loose collection of email threads, shared drives, spreadsheets, and institutional memory that lives in people’s heads.
When I say this to marketing managers, they often nod. They recognise the problem instantly. What’s harder to see is how much it’s actually costing them.
The way most teams manage translation today
Picture a typical translation project at a mid-sized manufacturing company.
A product catalog needs updating. The marketing manager emails the files to a translator or an agency. A week later, translated files come back. Feedback goes back and forth over email. Someone on the design team receives the final version and re-lays the content into InDesign. Then it happens again for the next language. Then again six months later when the catalog needs revising.
At each step, critical information leaks out of the process:
- Which terminology was approved for this market last year?
- What tone of voice guidance did we give the translator?
- Which version of the file is actually the final one?
- What feedback did the reviewer leave, and was it incorporated?
- Who is the right contact at the agency, and what are they working on right now?
None of this information disappears intentionally. It just has no place to live. So it ends up scattered: in inboxes, in chat threads, in someone’s memory, in a folder structure that made sense two years ago.
The result is that every project feels harder than it should. Not because the work itself is difficult, but because so much time goes into reconstructing context that should already be available.
Coordination is the invisible cost
When marketing teams audit their translation spend, they typically look at the obvious line items: agency fees, per-word rates, software subscriptions, design hours.
What rarely gets counted is the coordination cost.
Someone has to send the files, chase the translator for updates, re-send the glossary that was already shared three months ago, verify which document version is the final one, and brief the next person coming onto the project. None of that appears on an invoice. But all of it takes time. And the time compounds with every new language, every new market, every new project.
I’ve come to think of it this way: the tool cost of translation, such as software subscriptions, agency fees and the like, is visible. The coordination cost rarely is.
And because it’s invisible, it never gets addressed directly. Instead, it gets absorbed by the people doing the work, who just quietly spend more hours than they should on things that aren’t translation.
What “no home” actually looks like in practice
I want to be concrete about this, because I think the problem is easy to underestimate.
When translation has no centralised home, a few things happen consistently:
- Institutional knowledge walks out the door. When a translator leaves, or an agency relationship ends, or a team member moves on, the approved terminology, the tone decisions, the market-specific choices… all of it goes with them. The next project starts from scratch, and often slightly differently than the last one.
- Onboarding is always slow. Bringing a new translator or reviewer into a project meansa round of briefing calls, forwarded email threads, and documents sent back andforth to establish context that should already be in one place.
- Scaling creates chaos. Adding a new language or a new market doesn’t just add a linear amount of work. It multiplies the coordination overhead. More people, more files, more channels, more opportunities for something to fall through the gap.
- Consistency breaks down silently. Without a shared home for approved translations and terminology, the same product gets described slightly differently in Germany than in France. The same safety disclaimer appears three different ways acrossyour document library. No one planned for this. It just happened, slowly, across dozens of projects.
These are not edge cases. They are the norm for marketing teams managing translation without a centralised workspace.
Why I use the word “workspace”
At Redokun, I started talking more about translation workspaces, rather than translation management systems or translation workflows. And the distinction matters more than it might seem.
A system is something you route things through. You put files in one end and get output from the other. It’s transactional. It doesn’t hold knowledge; it processes tasks.
A workspace is something your team works from. It’s where the documents live, where the glossary is maintained, where translators leave comments and managers leave briefs, where the history of every project is accessible to anyone who needs it. It’s not a pipeline. It’s an environment.
The reason this distinction matters is that the problem most teams have isn’t a pipeline problem. They can usually get files from A to B. The problem is that nothing is retained in between. The context, the decisions, the approved language… none of it accumulates. Every project starts almost from zero.
A workspace fixes that. Not by adding process, but by giving the work a place to live.
The compounding value of a centralised workspace
One of the things that doesn’t get talked about enough is how much the value of a translation workspace compounds over time.
The first project you run through a centralised workspace looks more or less like any other project. You translate the content, review it, approve it. The difference is that everything you’ve confirmed is retained: every segment, every terminology decision, every piece of reviewer feedback.
The second project is a little faster, because some of the content matches what you’ve already approved.
By the fifth project, you’re operating with a growing library of approved translations, a glossary that reflects real decisions made by real reviewers, and a team that doesn’t need to be re-briefed from scratch every time.
The overhead that characterises most translation projects starts to shrink. Fewer briefings, the re-sending, the version confusion, the inconsistencies to manage. Not dramatically all at once, but steadily, project by project.
That’s the compounding effect. The workspace gets more valuable the more you use it, because what was learned is never lost.
A question worth sitting with
If you manage translation for your team, here’s a questionI’d invite you to consider:
“If three people on your team left tomorrow, including whoever coordinates your translation projects, how much of what they know would your organisation actually be able to find?”
If the honest answer is “in emails, in shared drives, and in their heads,” that’s a sign that translation has no real home in your organisation.
That’s the underlying problem. The speed issues, the quality inconsistencies, the re-translated content, the coordination overhead — these are all symptoms.
Giving translation a centralised home doesn’t solve everything overnight. But it does give the work somewhere to accumulate, and that changes the trajectory of every project that comes after.
