The emergence of LLMs has raised concerns about the necessary skills for localization managers and linguists. As AI technology like LLMs becomes more accessible, the industry is shifting from human translation to machine translation, and consequently, from translating to post-editing skill sets. But what does this mean when we transition from MT engines to AI technology, including LLMs? The industry's focus is now on several key areas:

1. Ensuring high human-like quality translations.

2. Maintaining a consistent voice, tone, and quality in translated content.

3. Trusting systems to automate translation processes for quicker time to market. Although post-editing is one way to move forward, with the promise of even higher quality output from LLMs, we see a shift from individual string quality assurance to high-volume quality assurance tasks.

Not to mention, the generation of the high-quality output from LLMs will need to be addressed through proper linguist-empowered prompt engineering. Linguists will move away from being the middle step of a longer process, to start to partner with their localization managers and content creators to focus more on the creation and quality evaluation of localized content, shifting them from translators to Prompt Engineers (maybe even as Content Engineers!) and Quality Assurance.

But where does this leave our Localization Managers who normally spearhead these initiatives? With Linguists shifting into roles in partnering with business units, localization managers will move away from Project Management work and focus more on business release for regions and analytics for their impact - moving more into the realm of quality drivers for businesses (a vital and impactful role in the future). A paradigm shift is approaching for the localization industry, with linguists and localization managers becoming more crucial to a company's success than ever before. The challenge lies in determining where to start and how to achieve this transformation.

Host organization: Globalization and Localization Association