Localization Governance
Localization governance defines who can propose, review, approve, and dispute multilingual content changes.
Governance areas
- source ownership
- language maintainer roles
- terminology approvals
- dispute resolution
- review-state tracking
- reusable review-example tracking
- review artifact freshness
- tooling documentation obligations
- native-language review quality
Why it matters
Without governance, multilingual content drifts in tone, terminology, and quality expectations.
Review governance should also define how AI-assisted correction examples are stored and reused across training, scorecards, and evaluation work.
Review artifact freshness
Governance should require reviewers to distinguish between:
- source Markdown
- generated HTML
- deployed site output
- browser-rendered output
Before parity signoff, reviewers should confirm that the generated artifacts being inspected were regenerated from the current repository state.
Tooling governance
New generators, renderers, transformers, validators, audit tools, and other content-processing tools should be treated as governance artifacts, not just implementation details.
They are not complete until:
- their purpose and limits are documented
- their non-obvious rules and heuristics are explained
- relevant workflow and validation documentation are updated
- maintainers can interpret warnings, failures, and blind spots without reconstructing intent from code alone
Native-language review quality
Localization governance should require review not only for correctness, but also for natural native-language expression.
The standard is that a localized document should read as if it had originally been written in the target language.
That means reviewers should treat the following as quality findings:
- literal English sentence structure
- direct translation of English idioms
- translated-sounding governance or corporate language
- terminology that preserves source wording unnecessarily
Governance should also prioritize this review first for:
- newly created content
- recently expanded content
- content currently being edited
Older localized content should then be improved progressively over time rather than through a single repository-wide rewrite.