Welcome to “Building Localization from Scratch”, the series where we speak to founding localization leaders about what it really takes to build localization departments from the ground up.
This week, we spoke with Mauricio Both, Global Director of Language & Culture at Monks, a content, data, media, and technology powerhouse providing end-to-end services spanning content creation, digital advertising, brand strategy, data science, and social media management.
Before joining Monks in 2020, Mauricio spent more than a decade working at the intersection of localization, transcreation, and creative production. Drawing on experience gained at both Welocalize and OLIVER Agency, he was brought in to design and build the company’s in-house localization program.
In its first year alone, his team delivered six-figure annual savings, enabled more than 60 languages, and sourced a specialized network of in-market native experts. Today, the function operates almost like an agency within an agency. A credible challenger to localization’s biggest players, it supports some of the world’s most recognizable brands across all industries.
This is the story of how they built it.
A blank canvas
Before Mauricio’s arrival, the lack of a dedicated internal capability meant localization requests were executed in partnership with external agencies.
As a result, they had little control over quality, vendor management, commercials, or the operational side of delivery. In many ways, they were acting as traffic managers.
The global COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the year Mauricio joined, triggered a boom in digital advertising. Audiences were spending more time online, brands were investing heavily in digital channels, and the demand for content in more markets was growing rapidly.
Localization was gaining attention. Here was the opportunity to effect real change and build a fully-owned localization program within the company.
💡“It was a blank canvas, and somewhat of a blank check.”
The challenge was not simply to develop a localization department. The ambition was to build an internal capability that could extend the services Monks already provided, create new opportunities with existing clients, and eventually establish itself as a major player in the localization industry.
The importance of support
Building something from scratch is never straightforward. You need significant trust and support from the people around you to succeed.
💡“My team is incredible, and the support from the business has been fantastic. There are a huge number of people who have contributed to building this.”
Mauricio describes the freedom to do things your own way as one of the biggest advantages of building from the ground up. The trade-off is that every decision needs to be justified, and every new initiative requires buy-in.
💡“Both the blessing and the curse is that it’s a lot of work and there’s a lot of people you have to convince along the way of the value of what you’re doing and how you’ve chosen to go about things.”
That ability to demonstrate value was critical. As Mauricio puts it,
💡“It’s very nice for us to talk about the philosophy of localization and the importance of localization, but in the business world, it needs to move the needle for our clients as well as internally.”
Fortunately, that support came from across the business, particularly from Monks’ co-founders, who recognized the strategic value that localization could bring, and gave the team the trust and autonomy required to build it.
Laying the program’s foundations
Before scaling, Mauricio and the team focused on the function’s foundations. They identified several core pillars: Operations, Talent Enhancement, Finance & Commercial, Tech & Tooling, Capability Promotion, Innovation, and Data & Measurement. From there, they broke each area down into specific actions and priorities.
This framework became a simple but effective decision-making tool. Every investment, process, or initiative could be assessed against a straightforward question: does this help move us towards our objectives and key results.
The same deliberate thinking shaped their approach to talent. Rather than building a vast supplier network, the team adopted a boutique-style model, carefully selecting linguists, voiceover studios, and specialist partners that aligned with the quality and creativity standards required by global advertising work.
💡“We’re not interested in having 10,000 linguists in a huge database bidding for first-come, first-served work. We’re very intentional with the way we build.”
Language, culture, and business results
Part of what differentiates the team is that it doesn’t view localization as a purely transactional service. While clients want measurable outcomes, Mauricio believes those outcomes are often driven by factors that many feel are harder to quantify, like cultural relevance, familiarity, trust, and audience connection.
That’s why the team talks not only about awareness, consideration, and conversion, but also about familiarity, meaning, and uniqueness in local markets. After all, a consumer can be aware of a brand without feeling connected to it, or consider a product without understanding why it matters in their culture.
💡“Cultural relevance makes or breaks communication in advertising.”
This belief eventually led the team to rename the function to “Language & Culture”. For Mauricio, this name better captures the role they play: helping global brands communicate in ways that resonate with local audiences.
The AI pivot
The AI surge in recent years forced Monks to make a major decision: lead or follow?
They chose to lead, build, experiment, take risks together, and through that build something they’re proud of, without losing the essence of what shaped this function from the beginning.
Across Monks, AI is now embedded throughout the business, from operational workflows and internal tooling to Monks.Flow, the company’s AI-powered content platform.
Within Language & Culture, however, the approach is more nuanced. Building on the content hierarchies they already use to assess creative complexity, the team developed frameworks that determine where AI can add value and where human expertise remains essential. The result is a framework system of clearly defined routes that align content complexity, risk, budget, and timelines with the most appropriate delivery model.
Knowing this was a contentious topic, Mauricio expected the approach to be much less popular with linguists. To his surprise, he found that many of them embraced the change. They still have a fantastic relationship with the linguists they work with, who continue to receive frequent, and in many cases increased, amounts of work. Thanks to AI, the volume of projects has grown significantly, creating more opportunities for linguists.
💡“A personal, trust-based relationship with our linguists is key to navigating changes together.”
AI plays an important role in both delivery and operations, but its application is always guided by each client’s needs, comfort with experimentation, risk tolerance, and quality metrics.
Rather than building technology for technology’s sake, the team focuses on understanding where clients and language partners experience friction and developing tools that help solve those problems.
Building tools for creative localization
To support this approach, the team partnered with Monks’ innovation teams, developers, and creative technologists to build AI-powered tools tailored specifically to transcreation and multilingual asset production.
These tools can:
- Allow linguists to generate transcreation options with supporting rationale.
- Provide English back-translations.
- Produce multilingual output at scale.
- Connect with translation memories, terminology databases, and glossaries.
- Incorporate client-specific knowledge sources such as brand guidelines, tone of voice documentation, and audience insights.
All this is done without ever letting go of the human and linguist insight. Mauricio believes it’s too risky to put out anything that’s not human, native linguist checked, and doing so would go against the company’s Global AI Policies and its focus on the human orchestrator.
Building a challenger
Five and a half years after launch, Mauricio believes the team has achieved many of the goals it originally set out to accomplish.
Monks’ Language & Culture function has helped secure new business, expanded existing client relationships, and established itself as a serious contender in an increasingly competitive market. In many cases, localization is only one component of a broader client engagement. In others, it is the primary service being delivered.
Either way, the team regularly finds itself competing and winning against some of the largest and most established localization providers in the industry.
Their success offers a useful reminder that building from scratch is not always about creating something entirely new. Sometimes it’s about recognizing an opportunity inside an existing organization and having the vision, support, and persistence to turn it into a business in its own right.
What started as an outsourced service and a blank canvas has evolved into something much larger: a specialist agency operating within a global agency, combining creative expertise, cultural insight, and technology to help brands communicate more effectively around the world.
This interview is the tenth in our “Building Localization from Scratch” series, where we sit down with 10 localization industry leaders to pull back the curtain on what it actually takes to build a localization department from the ground up.
Every hard-won lesson, workflow, and strategy from the series is distilled into our White Paper: The Blueprint for Founding Localization Managers, a practical guide for localization leaders building their function from the ground up.
📢The White Paper launches in June 2026. Register your interest here, and we’ll send it straight to your inbox when it’s ready!