LocEssentials AI-Powered Translation Platform
LocEssentials came to us with a prototype of their Pragmatic Automatic Translation (PaT) system and needed it transformed into a production-ready platform - one that reflects their deep domain expertise and produces contextually accurate translations from their own proprietary linguistic corpus.
The Challenge
LocEssentials is a translation and localization consultancy that empowers organizations to manage multilingual content through education, expert consulting, and custom technology.
They had a working prototype of a corpus-informed automatic translation system - and needed it transformed into a robust, scalable product. Building a translation platform is hard. Building one that reflects proprietary linguistic expertise and remains cost-conscious at scale is a different problem entirely.
- Multi-step corpus contribution workflows with role-based review and approvals
- Multi-organization access boundaries and private account isolation
- Cost-conscious architecture for document extraction, metadata inference, and retrieval-heavy translation workflows
- Translations informed by LocEssentials' proprietary linguistic corpus - not generic machine translation
- Domain-faithful, contextually accurate whole-document output
- Linguistic Quality Assurance (LQA) built into the platform workflow
The Solution
We developed the MVP across structured milestones: corpus ingestion, corpus visualizations, translation pipeline, access controls, public and private accounts, and LQA - with weekly check-ins to keep stakeholders aligned on progress, feature intent, and specifications throughout.
Extraction at scale
- Robust document structure handling across formats and layouts
- Chunked processing and async extraction orchestration for reliability at volume
- Storage optimization that improved extraction quality while controlling compute costs
RAG-based translation
- Source text embedded, matched against LocEssentials' corpus, and passed to an LLM for translation
- Every translation returns both the output and the supporting corpus context - full auditability
- Domain-faithful output grounded in LocEssentials' proprietary linguistic corpus
Production scaffolding
- Role-based corpus contribution workflows with review and approval gates
- Multi-org access boundaries with public and private account isolation
- LQA built in as a first-class workflow step - not a post-translation checkbox
A working prototype is not
a production system.
The hardest shift wasn't technical - it was thinking like a product team, not just an implementation shop. Every workflow decision shaped how much of LocEssentials expertise could actually get into the system: how linguists contribute to a corpus, how approvers review, how LQA surfaces in context rather than as an afterthought. Getting that right meant anticipating how real users interact with the platform - not just building what was specified. That's the difference between shipping a prototype and shipping a product.
The Outcome
LocEssentials now has a production-grade platform that reflects their domain expertise and anticipates how real users interact with the system - built with a product mindset, not just an engineering checklist.