From news.designrush.com - September 4, 11:44 PM

"48% of Localization Isn't Translation, and AI Can't Do That Part


2002 Studios Media CEO, Steven Gurevitz, explains why faster translation doesn't always lead to better localization.


Translation services are expected to account for more than 52% of the global localization strategies market by service type this year, according to Coherent Market Insights, making them the industry's largest service category.


That leaves 48% of the spend going to everything else.


Demand is growing across the wider language services industry, too. Fortune Business Insights projects the global language services market will increase from $81.5 billion this year to $147.5 billion by 2034, a compound annual growth rate of nearly 8%.


But Steven Gurevitz, CEO of 2002 Studios Media, a leading content production and localization agency, says the larger share of that spend buys the least valuable part of the job.


"A lot of the spend on localization, which is translation, is what I call churn spend. In fact, no one's making money out of it. It's being fed into AI credits, and nowadays it's a commoditized item. The bit where the value is in the 48%," Gurevitz says.


AI can now translate huge volumes of content in seconds.


In fact, 88% of content decision-makers say their organizations already use generative AI for translation in some form, and 70% of translations are now machine-assisted, according to Forrester's Rethinking Localization in the Age of AI.


But customers experience much more than text. They move through websites, apps, videos, and support material, all of which need to work naturally in their language and culture.


The team at 2002 Studios Media believes that's where many localization projects begin to fall apart, because businesses often underestimate the engineering, production, and testing that follow translation.


Gurevitz adds that even with the translation speed offered by AI, the amount of work needed to localize digital products hasn't gone down.


"Customers aren't reading isolated blocks of text. They're using websites, apps, videos, and software. Every part of that experience has to work naturally in their language."


Why Businesses Keep Putting the Translation Process First
The misconception that localization means translation isn't new.


Much of the localization industry grew around translation services, so linguistics naturally became the starting point for many projects.


"The industry was set up by translation companies. They're often who people are going to. They've got the most money, they do the customer acquisition. But you're essentially getting into a food chain where we're at the back end," Gurevitz says.


Unfortunately, this resulted in production planning, engineering, multimedia, and quality assurance being treated as separate stages that come later.


Problems often begin before translation starts. Websites, videos, and e-learning courses are sometimes sent for translation before the source material has been properly prepared.


As layouts or technical requirements change, translators, designers, developers, and editors can find themselves revisiting work that could have been done correctly the first time around.


This is also seen when it comes to video localization.


A 30-second television commercial usually needs every translated voiceover to match the original runtime. A two-minute training or promotional video often doesn't because viewers won't compare different language versions side by side.


Yet many organizations still request tightly synchronized audio for every project because those selling and managing these solutions often don't understand the variables and options available to them, given that their core expertise is linguistics.


This often adds production time without necessarily improving the final experience.


"Many localization problems are created long before anyone starts translating," Gurevitz says.


"If nobody questions the project scope or workflow at the beginning, every team that follows spends time fixing problems that didn't need to exist.""
Ryan de Smidt
Sep 03 2026


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