Every week this July, we’re digging into the most common complaints in the localization industry, from mistranslations to missed deadlines, and sharing how we avoid these pitfalls at Local Concept. This week: slow turnaround times.
The Localization Frustration Series
Why Is This Taking So Long? Slow Turnaround Times
July 21, 2025
You’re trying to schedule your international product release, but the translations take much longer than you expected. Deadlines are slipping, teams are frustrated, and you’re not sure where the bottleneck is. What went wrong?
Common Causes of Delays
- Lack of Planning: If timelines, roles, and review stages aren’t defined at the beginning, it’s easy for tasks to fall behind.
- Disjointed Review Process: When feedback is given in rounds without coordination, even simple projects can drag on.
- Overreliance on Manual Work: Translating, formatting, and QA all by hand takes time and increases the risk of errors.
- Not Enough Resources: Some teams can’t scale up quickly when you need more languages or faster output.
How to Stay on Track
- Set Clear Expectations Early: Build a realistic timeline and clarify who is reviewing what and when.
- Centralize Feedback: Try to consolidate edits and approvals instead of going back and forth multiple times.
- Use Automation Where It Helps: Tools like translation memories or integrated QA can speed things up without compromising quality.
- Plan for Scale: If you have a multilingual rollout, make sure your team or provider can handle the volume.
Delays happen, but many can be avoided with the right structure in place.
Next week: “We Found So Many Errors!” Why Skipping QA and Review Can Sink a Project