Localization is more than just an afterthought

Most organizations already know they should localize their learning. The question is no longer whether to do it. It’s how to do it at scale, without the process collapsing under its own weight.

In our latest webinar, Jon Withrington, Global Customer & Capability Education Manager at Keune Haircosmetics, and Derek Bruce, Chief Learning & Knowledge Officer at Easygenerator, joined moderator Ashling Moran to walk through what global learning actually looks like in practice, and how organizations can move from reactive translation cycles to a structured localization model.

🎥 Watch the session: Missed it live? Watch the full recording below.

Translation and localization are not the same thing

Most organizations start in the same place: content built centrally, in one language, finalized, and then sent for translation. It’s a logical sequence on paper. In practice, it creates problems.

Direct translation moves words from one language to another. Localization moves meaning. That means adapting examples, measurements, cultural references, and industry-specific language so that content makes sense to the person receiving it, in the context they are working in.

Derek has seen both sides of this. Early in his career at ABN Amro, a Dutch company with 17 international locations, the approach was straightforward: “It was very much, almost like the head office kind of determines the content and you just translate rather than localize, which are two very different things.”

The impact of that distinction goes beyond comprehension. When learners receive content that was clearly designed somewhere else, for someone else, it signals something. As Derek put it: “Everything is just a variance and not localized properly. It creates that kind of ‘we don’t really matter’ kind of piece.”

Localization, done well, is not just a learning quality issue. It’s a culture issue.

Building localization as a system

Jon has been scaling learning across 70 countries in 23 languages at Keune Haircosmetics. His honest assessment of how they got there: “To be totally honest with you, a lot of trial and error.”

In the early days, one or two people were building everything, piloting was limited, and the process was reactive. Now, Keune runs a structured roadmap tied to their marketing calendar. Content moves from the customer and capability team through pilot countries including North America, the UK, Spain, and Brazil, gets refined, and then rolls out globally through the digital team. Weekly standups and quarterly reviews keep the process on track.

Jon’s advice to anyone starting out is to resist the urge to move fast: “Don’t try and do everything at once. Really have a roadmap in place and think strategically about this.” Keune started with English, German, French, and Spanish, then added two or three more languages the following year.

Derek adds that structure is only half of the equation. The human side requires trust. L&D teams working from a central office can fall into a “we’re better than” mindset that makes collaboration with local teams harder than it needs to be. He also flagged the time issue: “One of the worst things is to go, here’s our 99.9% finished content. You’ve got a week to make any changes.”

Real iterations require real time. Building that into the design process from the start is what makes localization sustainable rather than stressful.

Where AI fits in

AI has changed what’s realistic for multilingual content, particularly for video.

Before Keune adopted an AI video creation tool, producing video content cost between €20,000 and €30,000 per production cycle, with a lifespan of two to three years before updates were needed. The numbers look very different now. As Jon shared: “We spent in total €24,000, we produced over 800 interactive videos and it saved us around €800,000.”

The efficiency gains are real. But both Jon and Derek were clear that AI output is a starting point, not a finished product.

Jon put it directly: “Everything that you do with AI needs to have a human touch. Because at the end of the day, we are in the business of curating brain changes.” In Keune’s case, that matters especially. Their content includes industry-specific terminology that a translation tool alone won’t handle correctly. The review has to be done by someone who both understands the language and works within the industry.

Derek highlighted a less obvious benefit of AI in multilingual video: the ability to identify and correct bias quickly. When reviewing a multilingual video at a previous organization, his team noticed that certain voices were being used in ways that felt subtly negative. With AI, fixing it didn’t mean going back to a recording studio. “It just meant literally going, okay, that voiceover can now be this. And it was done, and that was within a couple of hours.”

The caution both speakers raised is around expectation management. Stakeholders who aren’t close to the process often assume AI delivers a finished result with minimal effort. Jon described the assumption as treating AI “like the Wand of Harry Potter, you know, you just whoop, and you get the result and it’s ready to go.” Getting buy-in requires showing the numbers and being upfront about what still takes time.

Derek’s summary was simple: “AI is a tool. It’s not the answer all the time. So use it wisely.”

What scalable global learning actually looks like

Scaling global learning requires the right ecosystem, not just the right tools. Derek framed it as needing three things at once: flexibility, speed, and consistency. Technology supports that, but so do people and processes.

One of the clearest points from the session was the importance of involving local teams from the start, not just at the review stage. The people closest to a specific region know what will land and what won’t. Derek gave the example of the word “banter,” which is commonly used in UK workplaces but carries a different meaning, or no meaning at all, in other regions. That kind of nuance only gets caught when the right people are involved early enough to do something about it.

For Jon, the future of localization at Keune is personalization: content engineered to what local teams actually expect to see, not just translated from a global template. Keune measures success by what happens offline after someone completes the training, whether they attend a seminar or purchase a product. That makes relevance non-negotiable.

As Derek put it, the stakes are straightforward: “If content can’t do that because it’s not right, because learners can’t understand it, we’ve failed our roles as well.”

How EasyTranslate fits into this

One of the practical challenges with localization is keeping translation from becoming a bottleneck. EasyTranslate is built into Easygenerator’s authoring workflow so translation happens where the content already lives. Reviewers come in to make targeted edits rather than rebuild from scratch, and when something needs updating, you push the change across languages without re-uploading or re-exporting.

If you want to see this in practice, Anna Pryczek, Customer Value Manager at Easygenerator, is hosting a live product session on how to create multilingual courses, manage updates, and translate content with EasyTranslate.

The bottom line

Localization is not a translation task bolted onto the end of a content project. It’s a design decision that shapes whether learners in different regions actually understand, apply, and benefit from what you build.

The organizations that scale it well treat it as a system with a clear roadmap, defined ownership, local involvement from day one, and tools that reduce manual effort without removing human judgment.

Jon’s closing words said it best: “Collaborate, communicate, and cultivate.”

👏 Huge thanks to Jon Withrington for joining this conversation.