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KRAUSMEDIA

Embedded Localization Lead

Your fractional localization function.

A monthly retainer. One person who owns terminology, vendor coordination, MT pipelines, in-product strings, market-by-market QA. The role you can't justify hiring full-time, in the form you can.

See if this fits your company

Three problems I keep being hired to fix

Localization is "owned by" your marketing manager. Who has four other priorities.

Strings get translated, but nobody is curating terminology. Your German pages call the same product three different names. Your Czech UI mixes formal and informal "you" in the same flow. The marketing manager isn't a linguist, and shouldn't be.

You contract translation agencies, but the coordination still lands on your team.

Briefing, file prep, terminology questions, QA review, file integration — all of it is your team's overhead. You're paying agency rates and still doing project management in-house.

You're not big enough to justify a full-time loc lead. You're definitely big enough to need one.

Hiring a senior localization manager in Berlin or Prague costs €70k–110k a year, plus equipment, plus management overhead. For most growing companies expanding into 4–8 markets, that's overkill. But the alternative — fragmenting the work across freelancers and agencies — costs you in consistency, speed, and brand voice.

What "embedded" actually means

Embedded means I plug into your team the way an in-house hire would. Slack channel. Shared Notion / Confluence / Drive. Access to your CMS, your repo if relevant, your TMS. I show up to your weekly localization sync — or I run it.

What stays mine: the institutional memory of your localization. Glossaries, TMs, style guides, vendor contacts, MT engine tuning, regression notes. Built up across the engagement, owned by you, handed back to you in clean, portable formats whenever you want.

What's included in a standard retainer

  • All Czech and Slovak linguistic work up to a monthly volume cap (we agree on this together).
  • Vendor selection and oversight for language pairs I don't speak natively (DE, FR, ES, NL, PL among others), using my network of vetted senior linguists.
  • Terminology management — building, maintaining, enforcing.
  • Translation memory hygiene across all your tools.
  • MT engine evaluation and post-editing pipeline design.
  • Style guide development and enforcement.
  • i18n code review (Django, React, gettext, ICU MessageFormat).
  • CAT tool training for your in-house contributors.
  • Monthly written report. Quarterly strategy review.

How engagements start

Every retainer begins with a 30-day pilot. Fixed scope, fixed price, no commitment beyond. At the end of the pilot you have: a complete localization audit of your current setup, three concrete improvements implemented, and enough signal to decide whether the long-term model fits.

How it compares

Owns terminology long-term

Translation agency
No
Senior freelancer
No
Full-time hire
Yes
Embedded Lead
Yes

Available for ad-hoc questions

Translation agency
Limited
Senior freelancer
Yes
Full-time hire
Yes
Embedded Lead
Yes

Engineering / i18n review

Translation agency
No
Senior freelancer
Sometimes
Full-time hire
Yes
Embedded Lead
Yes

Predictable monthly cost

Translation agency
No (project-based)
Senior freelancer
No (hourly)
Full-time hire
Yes (€80k+/yr)
Embedded Lead
Yes (retainer)

Scales up for spikes

Translation agency
Yes
Senior freelancer
No
Full-time hire
No
Embedded Lead
Yes (via vendors I oversee)

Knows your product after 6 months

Translation agency
No
Senior freelancer
Maybe
Full-time hire
Yes
Embedded Lead
Yes

Hands back portable assets when you leave

Translation agency
No
Senior freelancer
No
Full-time hire
N/A
Embedded Lead
Yes

Pricing

Retainers are scoped to your monthly volume, the breadth of markets you serve, and the depth of engineering integration you need. Three tiers exist; specifics happen in conversation.

The 30-day pilot is fixed-price. Numbers shared in our first call.

Request a confidential intake call

Common questions

Is this an exclusive engagement? +

No. I work with several clients in parallel, with capacity managed transparently. If your monthly volume saturates more than 50% of my time, we have a different conversation about exclusivity.

What if you're sick or on vacation? +

Vacation is scheduled and announced 4 weeks in advance. For illness, I have a small network of trusted senior linguists who can cover continuity for short periods. The TM, glossary, and project assets are always portable — you are never locked in.

What about language pairs you don't speak natively? +

Czech and Slovak are mine, end-to-end. For other pairs (German, French, Spanish, Dutch, Polish among others) I source senior linguists from my network and oversee their work. You get one point of contact, multilingual coverage.

How is this different from hiring a translation agency? +

Agencies sell capacity. I sell ownership. An agency optimizes for throughput across many clients; I optimize for consistency on yours. An agency rotates linguists; I am the linguist (and PM, and engineer) for your account.

Can you sign an NDA? +

Yes. I can sign yours, or provide a standard mutual NDA in advance of our first call. Kraus Media s.r.o. is a registered Czech legal entity (IČO 24798410, VAT CZ24798410), so this is contracting with a company, not a person.

Where are you based? +

Czechia, EU. I work in CET, but my schedule is flexible enough to overlap with US East Coast for most of the day.

What's your background? +

Twenty-two years as a translator and localization specialist, certified MT Post-Editor (RWS, 2025), and a working developer. I build the i18n tooling I review. There's an About page with more.

Worth a 30-minute conversation?

Tell me what you're working on. I'll tell you, candidly, whether the embedded model fits — and if not, what would.

Describe your project