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.
Our first interview is with Victor Zhuang, Head of Localization at WEEX, a secure crypto trading platform with over 6.2 million users in over 150 countries, with a daily trading volume exceeding US$1 billion.
When Victor joined 1 year and 8 months ago, WEEX was localizing into just 4 languages. Requests were handled via Slack, often by customer support staff. With no system and no tools in place, Victor stepped into his role with a triple challenge:
- Building a strategy
- Creating a system
- Proving the value of localization within the company.
Today, things are very different. Victor now works in a team with three Project Managers and one full-time in-house language owner for each of WEEX’s 19 supported languages.
How localization started at WEEX
The localization department at WEEX was born from a problem.
The CEO had read the company’s English content. As he was noticing language issues as a non-native speaker, he could only assume it was even worse for native speakers. And if English had problems, what about the other languages in operation as well?
The benchmark was simple: Getting the English to a point where he can’t find any mistakes. The challenge was finding someone to own the solution.
Victor describes this feeling of reading something that doesn’t feel right as “linguistic strangeness”. Chinese is also a lot more compact than English (each symbol represents a word). This meant that when going into English, one line turned into five, which was an issue for short-form UI copy, like headers. These are real issues that you can only catch with enough native English speakers at the company flagging them.
WEEX came to a critical realization: Localization within the company couldn’t remain reactive.
Planned growth into new markets became the trigger for creating a more structured localization system.
💡“If you’re going to be an international company, most of the money you make needs to be from an international market”.
Building a future-proof localization structure
It was Victor’s job to effect this change, starting from the foundations. Drawing upon his previous experience working in large localization programs (he was previously head of the English team at Bitget), he made some important initial decisions about structure, developed a style guide, and undertook a linguistic audit of the full website and app.
The hiring reality
The first challenge appeared pretty quickly: Hiring.
Localization is a freelance-heavy industry. To match the company’s operations and growth, Victor was looking to hire in-house.
He led much of the hiring personally, with a clear approach: Find talented people who would contribute, but who also wanted a 9-5 role. He needed one person to “own” each language (covering English himself in the short term).
Looking back, Victor admits he was not always selective enough with early hires. Some roles required multiple replacements before they found the right fit. Misalignment is both financially and operationally expensive. As a result, he’s now a lot more selective in hiring.
Setting structure early
💡“You need to structure the localization workflow as soon as possible. Once you force it through a single channel, you can optimize that channel. If it’s coming from here, there, and everywhere and there’s no structure, it’s impossible to make any changes”.
One of Victor’s earliest moves was to centralize all localization requests into a single workflow. This meant everyone at the company was told to go through this workflow if they needed anything translated. This created visibility over the workload and demand, and gave the team control over intake and prioritization.
However, it soon became clear that they needed to work on stakeholder education. Teams needed to understand why localization is important, and how they should approach it.
Introducing a Translation Management System
💡“We need to get on a CAT tool immediately”.
It was clear that the previous system of translating over Slack messages was not a long-term solution. Victor knew that WEEX had to set up a TMS for better operational efficiency and scalability.
After being unable to secure his provider of choice, he set up an initial plan with a smaller one. As they grew, they continued adding on feature after feature until they got to a point where this system was not optimized for them anymore. They eventually switched to the first choice TMS, after a mutual contact put them in touch.
With hindsight, Victor would have pushed for his preferred option in the beginning. He knew the alternative solution wasn’t the best fit, and if they had gone with the preferred option the first time around, they would have saved the need to migrate later on.
Optimizing for growth, not cost savings
There was also a shift in mindset around cost. Despite not having a set budget, Victor was initially quite frugal with his spending. On reflection, he now believes that if you’re going to spend money, you might as well spend it earlier to make things move faster.
Doing everything manually meant not having the time to work on other important things like discussions with product and engineering teams, collating code issues, etc.
Crucially, the CEO was not optimizing for cost, he was optimizing for growth. Saving money was halting this.
Fighting for a seat at the table
Even with leadership support, localization wasn’t automatically embedded across teams. As the “new kid on the block”, the next challenge for the team was to cement the importance of localization across the board.
There are two ways of doing this: Going to their boss, or writing guidelines for them to follow. In practice, Victor didn’t want to complain to the CEO every time he wanted a solution.
Instead, the team needed to convince the product, engineering and marketing teams that localization matters.
For example, localization issues were previously added to a request pool where developers ranked issues in order of priority. A lack of understanding of localization’s value meant reported localization bugs were not getting prioritized. The team has fought for localization bugs to be fixed like any other bug. They are not 100% there yet with this, but are moving in the right direction.
Victor found the pressure of visible localization issues to be the motivating force to move fast and fight for solutions. It took over a year to build relationships with other teams and deepen the understanding of localization’s value.
💡“One of the things we had to fight for is to get a seat at the table with the product team. Initially, we weren’t part of the conversation at all. Now every time there’s a new product launch, the localization team sits at the meetings”.
This hard-earned win was the turning point for the team. Localization moved from reactive support to proactive involvement.
The next bottleneck: Dev workflow
💡“It becomes this big mess of negotiating what work gets done where, who has the overall say. That’s the challenge”.
Content localization is a challenge because the workflow involves several departments: Design, Product, Dev, and Localization.
For a long time, the localization team’s role was to come in at the end and translate a bunch of text with no context.
They now have access to the Figma files. This gives them a visual reference, but it means localization managers also have the time-consuming task of comparing the source with Figma, matching up the text and the key-value pair one by one.
Right now, the team is pushing to get an automated workflow where the key-value pairs are tagged in advance, and context is preserved upstream.
Getting everyone on board is an organizational challenge because it means giving other teams more work, although it will save the dev team time in the long run.
Key takeaways: Foundations for future growth
It’s not easy for a founding department to introduce and integrate new workflows to already busy teams. Victor’s story demonstrates the importance of raising the profile of localization within organizations and getting a seat at the table when crucial decisions and roadmaps are being developed. This increased visibility and careful planning meant localization at WEEX very quickly went from ad hoc translations over Slack messages to a structured, future-proof operation.
From finding the right tools to setting a budget in line with projected growth, the department’s journey wasn’t always smooth. Now, thanks to Victor and his team’s structured program, localization at WEEX is built to handle new languages and fast growth with ease.
That’s the difference between embedding localization as a process, and tacking it on as an afterthought.
This interview is the first 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!