This checklist helps teams get an honest read on where their AI localization program stands. It covers three areas: how the program is set up, how quality is being overseen, and how impact is measured and communicated internally. Go section by section, check off what's in place, and use what's left unchecked as your starting point.

 

What's in the checklist

Section 1: Your program setup

The foundation questions that often go unexamined. This section covers how the team is perceived internally, whether the right people are involved when AI translation decisions get made, which teams own content that needs to go global, and whether linguistic standards are built into the workflow from the start or fixed as corrections later.

 

Section 2: Quality oversight

The section where most programs have the biggest gaps. Industry standard for language service provider (LSP) sample review covers only 5-15% of content, meaning the rest ships without anyone checking it. This section covers how to measure quality across full translation output, track trends over time, and make informed decisions about when human review is actually needed.

 

Section 3: Metrics and momentum

Covers how to report on localization's contribution to business results and how to keep the team's value visible to leadership on a regular basis. Includes questions to help think through what the localization function looks like 18 months from now as AI translation governance becomes a defined discipline.

 

Who this checklist is useful for

This checklist is relevant to anyone involved in getting content to global audiences at scale. That includes localization managers assessing their AI translation programs, marketing leaders responsible for multilingual content quality, product and engineering teams integrating translation into their workflows, and global program managers who need to report on localization's impact to leadership.

If your organization is shipping content in more than one language and you're not confident the quality bar is holding as volume grows, this checklist will help you find out where the gaps are.