In today’s fast-paced tech industry, going global isn’t a distant milestone; it’s a part of the roadmap from day one. Whether it’s adapting your software or website for new markets or translating support content, translation quickly becomes a critical component of your daily work.
Yet, for many tech companies, translation remains stuck in the past.
It usually begins innocently enough: a developer exports a spreadsheet, someone emails it to a translator, the translations come back, and someone else pastes them back into the codebase. No fancy tools. No centralized system. Just a patchwork of files and emails.
At first glance, this manual approach might feel efficient. After all, it costs nothing upfront, and everyone seems to know their part. But over time, what looks simple quickly becomes a costly mess.
Manual translation workflows tend to create problems that aren’t visible until they start to hurt. Teams lose hours hunting down the latest version of a file or waiting for updates. Developers are pulled away from coding to manage translations. Releases get delayed because someone forgot to include content for German or Japanese. When previous translations can’t be reused efficiently, and there’s no way to improve speed or accuracy, consistency across languages often suffers. Without a centralized solution in place, this ultimately lowers overall quality and weakens user trust.
Worse still, each new language or market amplifies the chaos. What worked for three languages becomes unmanageable at ten. What one product team could juggle breaks down when localization is needed across marketing, documentation, and support.
What’s often overlooked is how deeply these inefficiencies affect your business. Developer time isn’t free. Delayed releases impact revenue. Inconsistent translations damage your product’s credibility in global markets. Multiply that across every sprint, feature, and update, and you begin to see the true cost.
Many companies don’t realize they have a problem until it’s already costing them money. If your translation process still relies on spreadsheets, email chains, or manual file handling, you’re likely spending far more than you think, not just in money, but in momentum. Fragmented workflows, missing context, and repeated tasks aren’t just frustrating, they’re signs that your translation process isn’t ready to scale.
And here’s the hard truth: these challenges don’t fix themselves. As your company grows, so will the complexity.
If manual workflows are dragging down your team, the good news is that there’s a smarter, more scalable way to manage translation that doesn’t require hiring more people or buying more tools. It starts with adopting a Translation Management System (TMS) purpose-built for modern software companies.
Scaling global content without losing time, consistency, or control requires the right infrastructure. A Translation Management System (TMS) brings automation, collaboration, and centralized control to the entire translation process. It helps teams optimize workflows, reuse existing translations, maintain quality across languages, automate translation with the help of AI, and ship multilingual content faster. For tech companies managing constant updates and releases, a TMS transforms translation from a bottleneck into a competitive advantage.
A TMS acts as the central hub for all your translation work. Instead of juggling spreadsheets and emails, your translators, developers, project managers, and reviewers collaborate in one platform, with automation and quality checks built in.
“We quickly realized that it offers exactly the workflows we need to achieve our goals. We deal with a lot of products, so it’s important for us that the service is not limited to a certain number of translations.” – Janina Ruebsam, Team Lead Trade & Product Marketing at ASUS
Imagine this instead:
Whenever your team updates text in the product, the system automatically picks up the changes. It uses past translations to populate what’s already been translated and only asks human translators to work on what’s new or different. Translations are then reviewed for quality and quickly sent back into your product. No endless emails, no manual copying, and no uncertainty. Moreover, today’s advancements in translation technology allow AI-powered solutions to deliver brand-tailored translations that require little to no post-editing.
The result? Faster releases, consistent translations, and a smoother process that lets your team focus on building great products instead of chasing updates.
While there are several TMS tools on the market, memoQ TMS stands out for tech teams because of its focus on flexibility, quality, and control.
With memoQ TMS, you get:
Instead of translation being a side task, it becomes part of the product lifecycle: consistent, scalable, and transparent.
We’ve seen startups reduce translation turnaround times by 50% with memoQ TMS. Mid-sized SaaS companies with global clients have cut translation costs by up to 30%. Teams that were once buried in spreadsheets now deliver multilingual releases on the same sprint cycle, and their developers no longer dread translation requests.
For instance, ASUS reported a 90% increase in productivity and much-needed transparency within the team after introducing memoQ TMS into their translation process.
Moreover, HubSpot has started using AGT, memoQ’s AI translation automation solution, and the results speak for themselves:
“It was very noticeable that the ability of memoQ AGT to leverage context-specific information when generating translations has significantly enhanced translation accuracy and quality, well surpassing the capabilities of some traditional machine translation tools.” – Dierk Runne, Senior Manager Product Localization & Systems at HubSpot Germany GmbH
This isn’t just about saving time. It’s about freeing your team to focus on what matters most: building and shipping great products and taking them to market in the language your customers speak.