Well, we just wrapped up a crazy year. AI has been in our faces. Lots of brands have been shipping winning and flopping products. And we've tried to keep up with what our users want without drifting from our core product-building mission or turning ourselves into an AI wrapper. A real rollercoaster for sure, but with a lot of fun and breakthroughs nonetheless.
Between the event hopping we've done, our two hackathons, new product updates, and welcoming new faces to our growing team, we've been busy. But we're ready for it all. Let's catch up on the product wins, team growth, life behind the desk (and away from it), and what we're building next.
⚡ TL;DR 🔗
🤖 Localazy AI & Style Guides launched: Context-aware translations become more accurate / 🎨 Major UI improvements: Dark mode, revamped translation interface, and advanced automated workflows / 🔌 Webflow & Strapi v5 integrations / ⚙️ Automations went live - Rule-based workflows for all Autopilot tier customers / 🎙️ 18 podcast episodes across two seasons covering everything from AI to accessibility / 🎪 Multiple SaaS events & two hackathons / 👥 Two amazing new team members, Dorian and Michaela / 📊 Professional translation support expanded
📊 Our 2025 in numbers 🔗
This year, we've served thousands of projects across hundreds of languages, achieving over 200 million processed translations through our platform among 38,000 projects. Our community has been incredible, from solo SaaS founders to enterprise teams, and we've been fortunate to connect with many of you through podcasts, events, and countless support conversations.
🌍 The most popular target languages in 2025 🔗
Our team is deeply focused on product work, and we haven't had much time for analytics. Last year's recap was light on data, but this one is different. David, our full-stack magician & AI Engineer, has been working on QA improvements that required crunching numbers, and the results are here!
When we look at a small sample of translations flowing through our platform this year, the data tells a clear story about where teams are expanding now, and where they're heading next.
European languages dominated at 47% of all translations. It turns out that expanding into Germany, France, and Spain is still the go-to move for most teams launching internationally.
The top 5 languages by translation volume so far are:
- 🇫🇷 French - 28% market share
- 🇩🇪 German - 9.8%
- 🇪🇸 Spanish - 8.6%
- 🇳🇱 Dutch - 3.1%
- 🇮🇹 Italian - 3.4%
Something not very surprising, perhaps. But here's where it gets interesting: when you look at the rising stars.
- 🇸🇦 Arabic jumped to 2.9% market share, signalling serious Middle Eastern expansion plans
- 🇵🇱 Polish hit 2.8%, confirming what we've been seeing all year: Central Europe is heating up
- 🇯🇵 Japanese reached 2.6%, showing that Asian markets are becoming harder to ignore
- 🇨🇳 Chinese Simplified held steady at 2.7%
- 🇮🇳 Hindi claimed 2.2% of the pie, as India moves up the priority list
The shift is unmistakable: even though Europe is a major market, teams are looking outside of it as well. If you're still only translating to French, German, and Spanish in 2026, you might want to reconsider your strategy.
🤓 Throwback: Back in 2023, the most popular languages on Localazy were German, French, Spanish, Arabic, and Italian, in that order. French has since taken the crown.
🏢 Industries we served in 2025 🔗
Looking at a small diverse subsection of companies using Localazy this year, here's how they break down by industry:
- 💻 Software / IT Services - 39.97% (by far our largest segment)
- 💼 Finance / Legal / Business Services - 16.46%
- 🛒 E-commerce / Retail / Consumer - 10.49%
- 🎨 Creative / Design / Digital Media - 10.01%
- ⚙️ Industrial / Engineering / Energy - 8.01%
- 🎮 Entertainment / Gaming / Culture - 6.48%
- 🏥 Healthcare / Life Sciences - 4.51%
- 🚗 Automotive / Transport / Logistics - 4.07%
Software dominated at 40%, and for good reason. Digital products need localization from day one to scale beyond their home market.
The rest? Fintech companies and banks (16.5%), where getting "confirm payment" wrong costs companies real money. Online stores (10.5%), where users like Digismoothie found out that checkout buttons need more than word-swapping. Gaming companies (6.5%), where bad translations tank your app store rating. And healthcare apps (4.5%), where projects like iFightDepression learned you can't run medical content through Google Translate and call it a day.
HR platforms like Bryq and CrewPlanner proved localization makes it much easier to provide fairer candidate assessments and efficient team management across 20+ locales.
🔖 Want to read the full stories? Head over to our case studies section.
Product updates 🔗
We shipped a lot of small and big improvements. Here's a recap if you missed them!
🤖 AI & Translations 🔗
- Style Guides. Remember when you had to email translators a 10-page brand voice doc that they'd ignore half the time? Not anymore. Set your tone, formality, and rules once, they show up automatically for translators and feed straight into Localazy AI.
- Localazy AI with brand context. AI that actually understands your brand, not just word-swapping. It reads your style guide, follows your glossary, learns from your existing translations. Not a MT that translates in a robotic tone without considering the context. $0.005 per word for Professional, Autopilot and up (and in Professional plans as well).
- Machine translation credits. Goodbye mysterious MT caps. Hello, clear credits. You finally know what you're using and what it costs.
⚙️ Automation & Workflows 🔗
- Automations. Set rules, walk away. Pre-translate new strings, copy between languages, auto-tag content, delete deprecated keys. Available on Autopilot and up. Because why do it manually when a simple automation does it for you?
- Translation priority and tags. Tag strings, set priorities, filter for focused sessions. Works with Automations so critical updates get fast-tracked while everything else runs in the background.
🔌 Integrations 🔗
- Webflow. Finally, we built an integration that connects to Webflow. Translate your Webflow site directly without copy-pasting or breaking your Collections structure.
- Strapi v5. Plugin updated for teams running Strapi's latest.
🎨 Localazy Interface Improvements 🔗
- Dark mode. Perfect for winter workdays and night owls. For a product built by devs and for devs, we sure took our time shipping this one, but now it's here. 😬 The interface is now comfy on your eyes for late-night translation sessions.
- Navigation redesign. Less blue header, more breathing room for what matters: your actual translations. And we're soon shipping another major redesign to make the interface more intuitive.
- Better progress tracking. We’ve added some useful language bars that show word counts on hover, and clearer bulk action results. The small stuff that adds up when you're managing 15 languages.
🏷️ Organization 🔗
- Ambassador program. You can now earn points for sharing your user experience (through G2 reviews, LinkedIn posting, case studies, starring our GitHub repos, subscribing to our newsletter, etc.). Trade them for premium features, donate them to projects you care about, and soon you'll be able to use them to get free translation credits too. We figured, why not reward people who take the time to share their experience with Localazy?
🌍 Professional translation improvements (new languages to the roster) 🔗
Our Continuous Localization Team added four more languages to the roster this year: Somali, Tigrinya, Punjabi, and Bengali. Not the usual suspects for localization platforms, but that's exactly why they matter. Companies expanding into East Africa and South Asia now have native translators ready to go.
Between human translators covering more languages and a smarter AI that references your brand guidelines, getting quality translations across multiple markets will take you less and less time.
🎪 Event hopping 🔗
Petr unofficially has accepted his fate as the brand's face, and you'll see him popping up at events more often. In November, we sent him to AppParade vol. 37 in Prague, a community event all about practical AI applications. He showed how our AI handles translations from start to finish, met other app founders figuring out localization, and naturally, we have a picture to prove it happened.
We also sent him to a SaaS Meetup in Brno, in an event on localization by the Czech Innovation Platform, and when we attended DigiFest.cz, he was supposed to present on ditching Excel and ChatGPT for proper localization tools but caught a cold. Luckily, our Solutions Architect took the stage, and delivered the presentation, with a racing heart. We’re passionate about the work we do, and we have data to back this up. You can look at his heart rate during that presentation for yourself. 😌
But that wasn't all. We also had two amazing hackathons that were not only fun but also a great time to talk about the product vision in person. The first one was in April at a mountain cottage in Kolštejn, tucked under Ramzovský saddle in the Jeseníky Mountains. Board games, brainstorming sessions, and plenty of chatting about where Localazy is headed. David couldn't resist a bike ride and Jan, being the runner he is, couldn't resist a mountain run, so a few of us tagged along for an intense exploration of the trails nearby too.
The second hackathon happened in November at Vlaštovička in Sobotín. Petr showed up with an entire board game arsenal: Wingspan, Crown of Ash, Dune: War for Arrakis, and backups. (He takes his board games seriously.)
Between games, we realized our About Us page wasn't good enough. It needed a full revamp, better team intros, Localazy's origin story, updated stats. We left with a plan to make it happen, and now it's about to go live soon.
👥 Team updates: Welcome aboard, Dorian & Michaela! 👋 🔗
Our team grew by two exceptional people in 2025. Here's who joined the Localazy family:
We’ll start with Dorian Maršálek, Account Manager & Content Marketing Specialist. Dorian's path to Localazy sounds like that of someone who kept saying "close, but not quite" until the right door opened. He studied English literature and music at Masaryk University in Brno, somehow ended up in sales at BVV Trade Fairs, then worked for two localization agencies before landing at Survio as a content and localization specialist.
Five years later, this September, he shook hands with Vašek and Jakub to join Localazy.
When we asked for a photo, he sent two: one with his family, one playing music. "These are what I love the most," he said. Makes sense, he's been playing piano since age 5 and his rock band is about to hit its 20th anniversary. He also loves inline skating, tennis, swimming, biking, and skiing, though he admits family activities are now taking over his sports schedule. (Half the team nodded in solidarity when they read this. We're a family-oriented bunch, what can we say. 🫣)
"Switching to Localazy simply felt like putting on a new coat. The product is great and what makes working at Localazy truly a joy is its team. We work hard but also celebrate wins as friends. I can build on my skills and experience while taking on new challenges that keep broadening my horizons. Everyone is helpful and open to sharing what they know, which makes the work both interactive and enjoyable." Welcome, Dorian!
Michaela Havlíková, Front-End Developer, joined us this year too. How she got into this field makes for a nice story: she started with making jewelry and sewing home accessories 🧵, creative outlets that eventually led to building her first websites. What began as personal projects turned into a self-taught journey through web development, courses, and more self-learning. She loved working with visuals, details, and user experience and that naturally pulled her toward front-end development.
When we asked what she values most about working at Localazy, she didn't hesitate: "At Localazy, I work closely with several colleagues and truly value the open and friendly communication," she says. "My teammates are supportive, helpful, and always willing to share their knowledge, which makes the work both effective and enjoyable. The work itself is diverse, engaging, and meaningful to me."
She also mentioned our last hackathon in November 🏔️ (the one where Petr brought his board game arsenal.) "It was a particularly memorable experience. I met most of my colleagues in person for the first time, and it only confirmed what a human, supportive, and open team we are."
Outside of work, Michaela reads constantly 📚 (you'll almost always find a book with her), loves traveling, and takes full advantage of remote work. During summer, she often works from Bulgaria by the sea. She also attends tech events and meetups to follow new trends and connect with people who share a passion for technology. Welcome, Michaela! 😄
📖 Word of the year: 🔗
Context (n.)
a. the circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea
b. the parts of something written or spoken that immediately precede and follow a word or passage and clarify its meaning
c. the interrelated conditions in which something exists or occurs
d. Information […] that helps […] produce accurate and meaningful translations.
If 2025 had a theme, this was it. From Style Guides that give translations brand context, to podcast discussions about better localization quality, to notes about our vision, everything came back to this word. And we bet it's gonna keep being relevant for a long, long time.
🎉 Meanwhile, in real life… 🔗
Between shipping features and attending events, the team had some personal milestones. Two weddings, one baby, some travels, the usual stuff when a year flies by.
💍 Vašek got married 🔗
Our CEO got married on July 5th, and of course, the entire team was invited, even though they couldn't all make it. It was a special type of celebration mixing Czech wedding traditions with summer welcoming celebrations: lunch with family, swimming (people brought swimsuits), beach volleyball, activities for kids. There was no highly formal dress code or making sure we kept a straight face for the sake of it. We're all about substance and less making it look good. Instead of stressing over gifts, Vašek just asked people to show up and celebrate. That was the main thing. Classic Vašek, practical even on his wedding day.
And oh, Marta, being one of the artists on the team, sang the first dance song, which made the special day even more special. 😄
This was a good year; so good we didn't stop at one wedding. 👀 Our Product Manager, Jan Bílek, also got married, and we were happy to celebrate with him. It was an eventful year for Jan. He got an offer to join Snowflake as Product Manager, and the team couldn't not push him to take it. We'll miss him at Localazy, but it's not a forever goodbye. He's part of the team as a friend, not just a colleague. He'll still show up at our informal events and hopefully our hackathons too.
Jan spent five years at Localazy, and was with us from the very first line of code, helping make product decisions that made Localazy the powerful platform you use today. Among his final contributions, he left us with data infrastructure we couldn't be prouder of. Good luck at Snowflake, Jan. 🎉
And then Dan became a dad (for the second time 🫣). Our Solutions Architect & Lead Front-End Dev welcomed a baby boy this year. Tomášek came a few days earlier than expected and made his presence known immediately with a "a mighty roar," according to his dad. The team sent love, congratulations, and zero useful advice about sleep.
And the rest? Kuba spent the year building his own house (literally). Dan rented an excavator for reasons we're still not entirely clear on. Ondra moved around Europe, and attended the Estonian Song and Dance Celebration (Eesti Laulupidu) in Tallinn, that occurs once in five years. Tibor came back from his long adventure in Vietnam. Jan and David hiked in Austria. Gled flew in from Albania to join our hackathon and explore Czechia and Austria. Avi went to Japan. Marta premiered her own music project and played enough concerts this year to make the rest of us look lazy (she took the "loca" in Localazy a bit too seriously, especially after she also went LinkedIn-viral on accident.🫣)
Some other fun stuff that were along the same lines: Ondra did his third halfmarathon in Tartu! And Vašek completed a Gladiator race.
💬 Top Slack moments from 2025 🔗
Slack is our big digital roundtable where almost all the conversations about product and life happen. Normally, you can find everything in there, from language-related memes to news articles and research papers. But here are five moments from 2025 that gave us a good laugh and might do the same for you. 🤭
1. 🤦 The translation fail that made us laugh (and keeps getting worse!) 🔗
At the start of 2025, Jakub wrote a heartfelt post in Czech thanking people who helped him through a rough year. When non-Czech-speaking teammates went to read it, found that LinkedIn auto-translated a part of it initially as: "It is important to have your Philip, as they say. Heaven itself sent you to me. I hope to pay you back all this one day, including interest. Your insight, a pat on the back when we f*cked." That was supposed to be "when I messed up". 😆
At the moment of writing this article, we thought LinkedIn might have fixed it. Nope! It got worse. The new version reads: "I've only been sent to heaven by you" and "a pat on the shoulder when we farted." 🤣
If this isn't enough proof of why professional translations matter, we don't know what is. Imagine Filip was your client and you translated a piece of communication like this and sent it to him. Yeah, not ideal for business. 🫣
2. 🤖 The "Kuba" AI benchmark 🔗
After this blooper, Václav dropped a new AI benchmark in Slack. And it's totally valid. We have yet to find a LLM that replicates Jakub's style of writing and thinking. His neurodivergent thinking remains unmatched.
3. 📊 Jan's data-driven wedding planning 🔗
Jan shared a weather analysis graph comparing July 12th vs. 19th temperatures and precipitation from 2014-2024. Because why trust intuition when you have historical climate data? Best part? It rained for a while during the wedding despite what ten years of patterns predicted. 😂
4. 📧 Our CEO became a spam magnet 🔗
Vašek's inbox had a wild year. But we'll show you three handpicked examples: an AI-generated sales email asking if Localazy supports "Esperanto" before pivoting to processor penalties and card disputes. 😳
Then someone tried impersonating him to convince an investor to send free AWS credits. At least spam is getting creative? Yet, these AI generated versions aren't yet there. But let's see what this year brings. 🙂
5. 😳 Marta went to prison 🔗
Marta casually mentioned she went to prison in May. The team had questions. Many questions. Turns out she went there with her gospel choir to perform for the inmates. Getting clearance, going through registration, and preparing for the visit took longer than the actual performance itself. 😅 But standing on that stage and singing for people who rarely get those moments? That made the entire process worthwhile and meaningful.
To wrap these Slack moments up, we sure have to mention some of the recaps from other tools we're using. Firstly, we have Riverside. Home to all our video assets. Ondra was the star of the recap as you can see: 😌
Then, Granola surprised all of its users with their spicy Granola Crunched. Many were impressed. And we were no different. These were some notable recaps. 🤭
📚 Our favorite content of 2025 🔗
We spent a lot of time on Riverside this year. Eighteen podcast episodes later, we're still surprised at how much we actually published. In the full episode list you will find something to listen between AI translation hype to localization metrics and remote work tips, but a few episodes sparked the most internal debate:
- S02, EP10: Automation should work with your team, not against it - How to effectively automate workflows without messing your teams work.
- S02, EP08: Most localization teams aren't ready for AI workflows - The uncomfortable truth about AI adoption in localization from the perspective of a software engineer and localization specialist.
- S01, EP03: Can LLMs replace translators? - The question everyone's thinking about as AI's capabilities grow further.
Between recording sessions and improving our product, we also collected some solid reads that ended up in our #reading_club Slack channel. The AI messaging study from Kyle Poyar touches on the AI bubble and why customers don't care about your AI feature as much as you think they do. We also nerded out over research papers on multilingual AI, machine translation evaluations, and cross-lingual models. The economic potential of generative AI from McKinsey required multiple breaks to finish, and AI-2027 predictions were either terrifying or exciting depending on who you asked in Slack.
Jan's team productivity deep dive about what to do when nothing seems to get done was a much needed reflection. Probably because we've all been there. Jevons Paradox made us rethink efficiency in ways we didn't expect. George Mack's essay on high agency became required reading; the kind of piece you bookmark and return to when you need a reminder that constraints are often self-imposed. And Jasmine Bina's 90-slide report on psychotechnology is simply a must-read musing on how to think about brand strategy in such unpredictable times.
📝 Our own hits 🔗
We published 70+ articles this year, but we'd like to highlight only a few. How multilingual content improves share of voice in generative search touched on GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) and why localization matters more than ever in AI-powered search. The biggest localization myths developers believed was a realistic confession of our founder. Our locale guide series expanded with more expansion advice pieces for the Tunisian, Vietnamese, and Polish market just to name a few, and the future of localization is lightweight laid out why less is often more when it comes to translation tools.
🎮 Useful (and ridiculous) tools we found 🔗
Not everything has to be serious. We came across some fun and some useful websites as well this year: Kick Ass lets you literally destroy websites (therapeutic after debugging), Emoji Translate turns text into emoji madness, and the CMO Translator decodes marketing jargon. Could these be the productivity tools you were missing? Debatable. Worth bookmarking? Absolutely.
📺 Bonus: Old-school commercials that slap 🔗
We're all obsessed with language and translation, so when Jakub and Petr found these vintage commercials (plus a Vine) in the wild, we couldn't resist sharing them. A bit harsh for today's marketing culture, maybe. But totally memorable! 😁
🤔 What's in store for 2026? 🔗
This year we shipped Style Guides, context-aware AI, and better automations. We welcomed Dorian and Michaela, attended events, ran two hackathons, and published 70+ articles plus 18 podcast episodes.
But we're far from slowing our pace. Because our users needs are evolving and Localazy keeps evolving with them too. Besides focusing on faster translations and stronger integrations, we have to refine translation accuracy and our QA systems. There's a lot coming in 2026, and with an airtight data infrastructure, growing team, and clearer vision, we're confident we'll ship more features worth the wait.
"With LLMs, good translations got cheaper. More teams went multilingual. Good for users, good for revenue. But the process is still tedious work, and achieving translation quality at scale is not easy. In 2026, we're laser focused on our mission: help teams ship multilingual products with confidence", says our founder, Václav Hodek.
For now, here's something we held back from last year. David surprised the team with this Christmas gift, Localazy lighting up Times Square. We didn't use it then, but it feels right to close this recap with it now. Here's to 2026. 🎉
