The language industry has spent decades built on a simple premise: someone writes something, someone else translates it. According to Florian Faes, Managing Director at Slator, that foundation is cracking, and what's emerging from underneath looks almost nothing like the industry people signed up for. In this episode of The Agile Localization Podcast, host Stefan Huyghe sits down with Florian ahead of SlatorCon San Francisco (September 3, 2026) to talk through what Slator's data is actually showing, and where the money, the talent, and the opportunity are headed next.

Nord Security is a global cybersecurity leader, trusted by over 20 million users worldwide. As the team behind great names like NordVPN, NordPass, and NordLocker, they operate on the absolute cutting edge of digital protection. Mantas Baraišis, Head of Localization at Nord Security, told us what it takes to localize products in a highly secure industry where brand communication requires maximum compliance. To manage massive, synchronized launches across their massive software ecosystem, Mantas and his team built an infrastructure with zero data leaks and maximum efficiency. Here is how they did it.

Brian McConnell, Localization Technology Partners I’ve spent the past twenty years working with startups and emerging companies to build out their localization and international growth technology and teams. Being based in San Francisco, I’ve worked with a wide range of companies of all sizes and stages of development, from seed to post-IPO. As varied as these companies were, they all struggled with international growth in similar ways and took longer than they should have to figure things out. The simplest explanation for this is that almost nobody has prior experience with international growth, or if they did, it was in the context of a much larger company that had already figured out tools and structure that allowed them to scale. Startups and early stage companies are inherently shambolic, especially when they are figuring out their product and how it fits within the overall market.

Video makes up roughly 80% of all internet traffic. And yet, when it comes to localization, video production has been operating in a world of copy-paste chaos, disconnected from the very workflows that have modernized everything else. In this episode of The Agile Localization Podcast, host Stefan Huyghe sits down with Stefani Vieira, a Product Manager at Cult Extensions, to explore how modern video localization can escape fragile manual processes and integrate into the broader localization ecosystem.

This July, we shipped a new advisor that flags translations gone stale after a glossary or style guide change, opened up serverless apps so anyone can build and host their own tools on Crowdin without a backend, and taught Crowdin Copilot to learn skills specific to your organization. The AI usage report now shows what every token was spent on, by which app, and what it cost. There's also a floating screenshot viewer in the Editor, scope tracking for tasks, noticeably faster loading for large projects, and a batch of Figma plugin updates. Let's dig in.

If you have ever managed a localization project with tens of thousands of strings, you know the struggle: finding duplicate keys, locating untranslated strings with specific tags, or fetching clean Translation Memory (TM) segments manually takes hours. While Crowdin provides powerful querying tools like CroQL (Crowdin Query Language) and GraphQL, crafting precise query expressions isn’t always intuitive. What if you could ask an AI coding assistant (like Claude Desktop, Cursor, or GitHub Copilot) to do that for you? In our previous guide on automating i18n context with AI agents, we covered how AI can automatically generate context descriptions for translators. But AI agents can do much more than just enrich JSON files. By combining AI Agents with Crowdin’s open-source croql and graphql agentic skills, you can also turn natural language questions into valid, optimized Crowdin API queries in seconds. Here is how to set it up and leverage it in your automated localization workflows.