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When regulated content fails in a new market, translation is usually what gets blamed.
The wording wasn’t accurate enough.
Legal missed something.
The translator didn’t understand the regulation.
Those explanations sound smart in a retro. They are also usually wrong.
In practice, regulated localisation almost never fails because of translation. It fails much earlier. Because teams try to translate their way into compliance, without ever defining what compliance actually means or who owns getting there.
Companies follow roughly the same playbook when they expand regulated content into new markets.
They write an “international” source wording.
They translate it.
They send it to local counsel.
They patch whatever comes back.
They launch.
On paper, that looks sensible. In reality, it rests on two assumptions that don’t hold in regulated environments.
The first is that compliance can be inherited from a source document - that if you start with something broadly reasonable, local compliance is just a matter of linguistic variation.
The second is that someone, somewhere, is accountable for making the whole thing coherent.
More often than not, neither is true.
Local compliance isn’t a translated version of a master document. It’s the outcome of a different regulatory landscape - shaped by jurisdiction, programme structure, distribution model, regulator expectations, and risk appetite.
Which is why localisation, in practice, isn’t translation at all. It’s regeneration. You are rebuilding documentation so that it is genuinely fit for a specific programme and market, not cosmetically adapted from something that was never designed for it.
Translation preserves structure. Compliance often requires changing it.
Regulators don’t just care about what you say. They care about how you say it, where you say it, and what else is happening around it.
That might mean different disclosures. Different sequencing. Different treatment of exclusions or limitations. Or pushing responsibility out of the wording and into the product or UX instead.
None of those problems are solved by better translation.
When teams translate first, they lock themselves into a reactive posture. Legal review turns into a clean-up exercise. Remediation happens late, under pressure. Risk decisions get made implicitly - or not at all.
When something breaks, it’s tempting to point at the translation. But the failure wasn’t linguistic.
It was structural.
In most organisations, regulated localisation doesn’t clearly belong anywhere.
Product teams design products.
Legal teams interpret regulation.
Compliance teams manage risk.
Content teams draft documents.
Translators and external counsel execute narrow slices of work.
Everyone owns a piece of the problem.
No one owns the system.
The result is predictable. Compliance expectations live in people’s heads. Decisions get buried in email threads and slack channels. Responsibility diffuses. Issues fall through the cracks and only surface when deadlines are tight and stakes are high.
Localisation doesn’t fail because teams are sloppy or inexperienced. It fails because the work itself is orphaned.
This problem is compounded in regions like the EEA.
What appears to be a single market is, in practice, a dense web of local regulatory interpretations, supervisory cultures, enforcement priorities, and languages. Even where legislation is nominally harmonised, expectations are not.
For lean teams, it is neither realistic nor desirable to staff every jurisdiction and language with dedicated legal and compliance expertise. The complexity grows exponentially, while headcount grows linearly.
Without a system to define, govern, and reuse compliance decisions, localisation inevitably becomes fragile - regardless of how capable the individuals involved may be.
There’s a reason translation is where everything seems to go wrong.
Once content is translated, ambiguity becomes amplified. Teams are suddenly forced to ask questions they should have answered much earlier.
Is this disclosure mandatory in this configuration?
Is this wording acceptable for this distribution model?
Is this risk something we’ve consciously accepted - or a mistranslation?
At that point, it’s easy to conclude that the translation caused the issue.
In reality, translation has simply surfaced misalignment that already existed - between the source wording, the programme design, and the local compliance landscape.
Legal review then gets dragged into compensating for the lack of structure upstream, acting as both interpreter and safety net.
There’s an additional, compounding problem once content crosses a language boundary.
In many organisations, the people responsible for legal and compliance approval can no longer clearly read the document they are being asked to sign off.
Review becomes dependent on summaries, comments, or third-party interpretations of what the local-language wording actually says. Subtle changes in meaning, emphasis, or sequencing are hard to detect - and sometimes impossible to interrogate with confidence.
At that point, approval becomes procedural rather than substantive. Sign-off happens not because the content is clearly understood, but because there is no practical way to dig further without blowing timelines apart.
Once content is translated, uncertainty doesn’t disappear.
It becomes harder to see.
Teams that scale regulated content successfully don’t rely on heroics, better translators, or more legal review.
They do something much less dramatic - and much more effective.
They define, upfront, what “compliant” actually means for a given programme and jurisdiction. They make explicit where risk is acceptable, what must be fixed, and what requires conscious sign-off. And they do that before they translate it into a language they might not understand.
Crucially, that definition is treated as a shared, governed artefact — not tribal knowledge locked in someone’s inbox.
Once that exists, everything downstream changes.
Documentation is regenerated to fit the compliance landscape, rather than inherited from a source wording that never stood a chance. Translation becomes execution, not interpretation. Legal review becomes confirmation, not discovery.
Ownership becomes clear.
The organisations that struggle most with regulated localisation aren’t naive or under-resourced.
They’re operating without a system.
No shared definition of compliance.
No standard way of regenerating content.
No clear owner for localisation as a capability.
Until that changes, localisation will keep feeling slow, risky, and unpredictable. No matter how good the translators or lawyers are.
The failure point isn’t language.
It’s the absence of a system.
Scaling regulated content breaks when compliance decisions lack ownership, memory, and governance - turning localisation into repeated discovery instead of execution.
Expand into new markets with clarity, control, and confidence - without scaling legal or compliance headcount.
