Imagine this: a company invests significant resources in designing a visually stunning, seamlessly interactive application that achieves resounding success in its home market. Buoyed by this triumph, the company confidently launches it globally, only to face disappointing feedback from international users. Some complain about awkward button labels, others abandon tasks due to unclear prompts, and some feel the product’s tone feels culturally out of place. The issues are varied but persistent.

What went wrong? Drawing from Giltbridge’s extensive experience in supporting enterprise globalization, the answer often lies in an underestimation of language’s role. Even a visually perfect product can falter if its interface text (UI Text), prompts, or help documentation fail to convey information accurately and connect emotionally with users. Without this, the so-called user experience (UX) becomes elusive, or worse, counterproductive.

Language is not merely a vehicle for information—it’s a core element in shaping user experience. It directly impacts a product’s usability, user trust, and brand connection. So, how can language become a strength in globalizing a product rather than a weakness? At Giltbridge, we believe the answer lies in deep collaboration between design and translation.

The Overlooked Gap: When UI/UX Design and Language Services Operate in Silos

In many traditional product development workflows, UI/UX design teams and language service teams (whether in-house or external Language Service Providers, LSPs) operate in relative isolation. The typical process unfolds as follows:

1. Design: UI/UX designers focus on visual layouts, interaction logic, and user flows, using their native language (often English or Chinese) for placeholder text.
2. Development: Engineers build the product based on design mockups.
3. Text Extraction: Near release, all translatable text (strings) is extracted from code or resource files.
4. Translation Handover: The extracted text, often devoid of context, is sent to the translation team.
5. Translation Delivery and Integration: The translation team completes the work within tight deadlines, and engineers integrate the translations into the product.
6. Testing and Fixes: Testers (who may not understand all target languages) conduct tests, identifying issues like truncated text, misalignments, or obvious mistranslations, which require rework.

This “waterfall” approach, marked by minimal communication, often leads to user experience issues:

• “Lost in Translation” Issues: Translators receive isolated words or phrases (e.g., “Submit,” “Settings,” “Cancel”) without context. Is “Submit” for a form or a review process? Lack of context leads to inaccurate translations or inappropriate tone.
• Text Length and Layout Conflicts: Designers base layouts on the source language’s length (e.g., English). However, translations in languages like German or Russian often expand significantly, while others like Chinese or Japanese are more compact. Without collaboration, translated text may get truncated, misaligned, or overflow, ruining aesthetics and usability.
• Cultural Misalignment Risks: Metaphors, icons, or expressions common in the source culture may confuse or offend in the target culture. Without communication between designers and translators, these “cultural landmines” are carried over. For example, a gesture icon may have vastly different meanings across cultures.
• Inconsistent Terminology: The same concept may be translated differently across interfaces, help documents, and marketing materials, confusing users and undermining professionalism.
• Inefficiency and Cost Overruns: Late-stage fixes for issues prolong time-to-market and increase costs for communication, revisions, and testing.

The Path to Synergy: Breaking Down Barriers to Empower UX with Language

To overcome these challenges, the key is to dismantle functional silos and establish tight, ongoing collaboration between UI/UX design and language service teams. This isn’t just process optimization—it’s a mindset shift: treating language as a core component of the product experience, not an afterthought “skin”.

Based on Giltbridge’s proven strategies from years of client work, here are effective collaboration approaches:

1. Early Involvement of Language Experts:
   • Participation in Concept and Design Phases: Invite localization experts or senior translation consultants to join early concept discussions and design reviews. They can advise on cultural adaptability, potential language challenges (e.g., text expansion), and internationalization (i18n) best practices.
   • Internationalization-First Design: Designers should account for multilingual scenarios from the start, using flexible layouts, avoiding hard-coded text in images, and reserving space for varying text lengths. Early input from language experts is critical.
2. Context Sharing and Visualization:
   • Provide Visual References: Instead of sending translators a dry list of strings, share wireframes, mockups, interactive prototypes, or access to test environments to show text in context.
   • Leverage Professional Tools: Modern Translation Management Systems (TMS) and Computer-Assisted Translation (CAT) tools often integrate with design platforms (e.g., Figma, Sketch) or offer visual context features, allowing translators to see how text appears in the interface during translation.
3. Establishing and Maintaining a Shared Terminology Database:
   • Unify Core Terms: At project outset, product, design, development, and language teams should collaboratively define key terms for core features and concepts, creating a multilingual termbase.
   • Ongoing Maintenance and Application: Ensure the termbase is maintained throughout the product lifecycle and consistently applied across all translation tasks to maintain coherence across interfaces, documentation, and marketing.
4. Pseudo-Localization Testing:
   • Simulate Language Challenges: Early in development, replace source text with special characters or artificially lengthened/shortened “pseudo-translated” text to mimic real translation issues (e.g., layout disruptions, encoding errors, overlooked hard-coded text). This identifies internationalization flaws before actual translation begins.
5. Iterative Feedback and Continuous Optimization:
   • Translator Feedback Channels: Create mechanisms for translators to raise questions or suggest improvements when encountering ambiguous source text, cultural risks, or better phrasing.
   • Linguistic Review: After translation, have native-speaking experts review the language in the actual product environment, checking translation quality, contextual fit, functional accuracy, and visual consistency.
   • Cross-Team Reviews: Regularly convene design, product, development, and language teams to review multilingual product versions, gather feedback, and drive continuous improvement.

The Value of Collaboration: Beyond Translation to Global UX Excellence

When design and language services become collaborative partners rather than isolated functions, the benefits are transformative:

• Enhanced Global User Satisfaction: Deliver products that align with local language habits, cultural contexts, and usage scenarios, making users feel natural, comfortable, and respected.
• Faster Global Market Entry: Early issue detection reduces rework, shortening localization cycles.
• Lower Localization Costs: Avoid additional expenses from quality issues or frequent source text updates.
• Strengthened Brand Consistency: Ensure brand voice and core messaging are accurately and uniformly conveyed across global markets.
• Boosted Product Competitiveness: In a globalized market, superior multilingual UX is a key differentiator for winning users.

For example, a leading global SaaS company we partnered with faced low adoption of a new feature in Europe. After analysis, we found that poor interface translations and terms misaligned with local workflows were major culprits, beyond the feature itself. We recommended adjusting their process to involve European language experts and industry consultants during the design phase to refine UI text and information architecture. Using a TMS platform with visual context capabilities, we made the translation process more transparent and efficient. These changes significantly improved user satisfaction and adoption rates in subsequent European releases.

Giltbridge: Your Trusted Language Partner

Achieving seamless design-translation collaboration requires not only a shift in mindset and processes but also a professional language service partner. With nearly 30 years of experience, Giltbridge understands the language challenges of enterprise globalization.

Our team of over 100 dedicated translators excels not only in language but also in industry-specific knowledge, particularly in technical documentation translation, localization, and intellectual property services. Beyond high-quality translation, we act as your consultant, engaging in early-stage product design to provide internationalization advice, terminology management, and localization testing. We help you build efficient cross-functional workflows, ensuring your product’s UX reaches global excellence.

About Giltbridge

With nearly three decades of growth, Giltbridge  has remained dedicated to pursuing excellence—constantly refining our service quality and technical expertise to deliver outstanding language, content, and intellectual property solutions. We’re excited to partner with you on your journey to international success, unlocking opportunities and driving innovation along the way.

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Whether you need our services or just want to learn more, reach out to our team via email, phone, or social media. We’re eager to work together and explore the boundless possibilities of the global market with you.