The localisation manager does not usually translate anything personally. They build and run the system that gets a product — a game, an app, a website, a set of legal terms — into thirty, fifty, or eighty languages simultaneously, and keep it that way as the product changes every week. The primary pull is Spread applied to infrastructure rather than to a single text: this is the industrialised, repeatable version of what the literary translator does by hand, one book at a time. The role manages translation-memory systems, terminology bases, vendor networks of freelance linguists, and increasingly the question of which content goes through machine translation first and which must be handled by a human from the start.
Many localisation managers are fluent in one or two languages and coordinate professional work in dozens they do not speak at all — the job is process and systems engineering with language as the domain, not language work itself. The distinct contribution is keeping a constantly-changing product simultaneously correct in every market it ships to, which is closer to release engineering than to translating.
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The tension between MT-first and human-first pipelines is the actual daily decision, and it is a harder call than it sounds — cheaper and faster does not always mean worse, but getting it wrong in the wrong market (a mistranslated legal disclaimer, a culturally tone-deaf marketing line) can be expensive in ways a spreadsheet does not capture in advance. Engineering teams that treat localisation as an afterthought create technical debt — hardcoded strings, no support for right-to-left languages or long German compound words breaking a layout — that the localisation team inherits and has to fix after the fact rather than before. UK salaries for localisation-specific roles sit in a wide band: localisation engineers average around £40,000 (range roughly £30,000–£54,000), while localisation managers range from around £51,000 entry-level to over £80,000 senior [survey_aggregator, Glassdoor / SalaryExpert 2026].
There is no single degree. Entrants arrive either from a languages background who picked up project management and localisation tooling, or from a software/project-management background who picked up the language-industry-specific tools (translation-management systems, CAT tools, pseudo-localisation testing). Certifications and training from bodies like GALA (Globalization and Localization Association) are recognised but not required; a demonstrated portfolio of managing multi-language product releases carries more weight than any single credential.
The role's value has shifted toward judgement about which content can safely go through AI and which cannot -- a higher-leverage version of the job than pure vendor coordination.
Growing; MT-first pipelines let smaller teams cover more languages and markets, expanding the role's scope rather than shrinking its headcount.
People drawn to Localisation Manager / Localisation Engineerare often drawn to these — in the order they're closest. The ones marked sit in a different field entirely.