Quality Manager Localisation

Team description

The Localization team at Booking.com ensures that the company's products, content, and customer experiences are tailored to global audiences. They develop and implement localization strategy, manage relationships with translation vendors, set and uphold rigorous quality standards, and collaborate with internal partners like Marketing and Product. The team leverages automation and internal/external expertise to deliver culturally relevant, high-quality translations at scale across multiple languages and regions. Their work enables Booking.com to connect with users worldwide, drive engagement, and support strategic initiatives like the Connected Trip, all while maintaining consistency, accuracy, and effectiveness across diverse markets.

Role Overview

The Localization Quality Manager owns the quality of Booking.com localised content (currently in 45 languages), driving linguistic excellence across all of our initiatives and through all of our localization solutions. The role is responsible for defining and evolving our localization quality management strategy, ensuring our methods, processes, tooling and metrics are adapted to current and future business needs, ensuring Booking.com can consistently provide a locally-relevant and culturally-resonant experience to our users in any language.

This role owns global standards and measurement techniques by which progress can be monitored and improvement can be made, including strong root cause and corrective action analysis methodologies. The Quality Manager works with internal and external teams providing translations (eg vendors, ML teams) directly to address systemic quality issues, and collaborates with/supports Language Managers to address language- or region-specific quality issues.

Whenever possible, the Quality Manager leverages end user feedback to identify areas for improvements in delivering better quality language / localisation.

This role has deep expertise of the translations industry as well as proven success in managing quality of language services at scale, the role seeks to innovate and continuously improve to ensure our users around the world experience high quality localised content.

Key Job Responsibilities and Duties

• Define, implement and evolve a holistic localization quality management strategy that caters for current and future business needs. Determine how we measure the success of that strategy and how operational quality metrics tie into overarching business goals, driving and optimising business value
• Define localisation quality standards and thresholds for all content types and languages
• Guarantee delivery of localised content in line with our quality KPIs/SLAs
• Engage with our stakeholders for product insights and content, to develop and maintain a comprehensive set of linguistic assets (style guides, terminology) to ensure best approach and quality for our critical content
• Oversee localization product testing
• Collaborate with our internal and external language teams to ensure quality expectations and overall processes are clear
• Analyze stakeholder feedback, develop action plans where necessary and ensure stakeholders are regularly updated
• Own CAPA system, dedicate time to investigate localisation issues found on our website, develop lasting solutions for improvement by replicating best practices across languages and projects
• Monitor quality,. use data to identify quality trends per content types/fulfilment means/languages, and build action plans to address any systemic issues
• Work with Localization colleagues and Product & Tech teams on any tooling and systems requirement that can improve language quality
• Collaborate with Scaled Content Analytics team to define how we measure quality and value

• Master's degree, in Localization, Language Studies, International Studies or a related field, or equivalent experience
• A minimum of 8 years of relevant job experience
• Extensive background in Localisation (e.g. managing operations, projects or vendors in a translation environment)
• Experience in QA testing or Linguistic QA management
• Thorough understanding of translation technologies: Translation Memories, Translation Management Systems, Machine Translation etc.
• Experience with translation quality management (methodologies and metrics) and Terminology management
• Experience with e-commerce product localisation and marketing and creative content translation and transcreation
• High level of autonomy, effective communication, experience driving results through cross-functional teams
• Experience analyzing complex data sets and interpreting them to make business decisions
• Keen interest in translation technology and industry trends
• Fluency in English and at least one other language

• The benefits and perks offered by the company can be found here.

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