Senior Localisation Specialist Italian- Marketplace

Team description

The Localisation 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 Senior Localisation Specialist seeks to bring the best user experience to our audience in the Italian market, one of the company's key markets, through high quality localisation. The Senior Localisation Specialist will help ensure the localised and transcreated content provided into Italian to Booking.com and its sister companies is accurate, locally relevant, and adhering to brand and product instructions and requirements as well as internal language assets. This will support the success of global strategic ambitions, new product launches, and various campaigns in the company's key markets locally.

They are expert in quality and language asset management, as well as translation, localisation, and transcreation. They are advanced users of translation management systems and possess the knowledge and skills required to train and critically assess quality provided by internal and external linguists in Italian as per the applicable quality framework.

• Own and be responsible and accountable for the quality of the translations provided by internal and external linguists in Italian to ensure the localised content into Italian is accurate, adapted to the local culture and market. It should also adhere to brand and product instructions and requirements as well as internal language assets. Thus supporting the success of global strategic ambitions in their key market locally;
• Create, manage and maintain internal language assets and Italian language and culture guidelines, including term bases, glossaries, translation memories, style guides to be used by internal and external linguists;
• Assess the quality of the copy transcreated as part of key-market campaigns into the local language. May get involved at any stage of the end-to-end journey from the copy/brief creation of content to the localized copy quality assessment.
• Perform regular quality assessments of the copy translated by internal and external linguists as per applicable quality framework and driving translated copy improvements based on stakeholder feedback;
• Provide quality coaching and training to internal linguists, external vendors and freelancers to maintain and/or improve quality of the content localised into Italian;
• Monitor quality performance metrics and output of internal and external linguists providing translations into Italian. Identify and act upon opportunities for improvement identified by performing root cause analysis, quality deep dives, and giving consistent feedback and training to internal and external linguists.;
• Ensuring that existing and new quality processes, methodologies, and guidelines are followed and understood by vendor linguists and that applicable quality performance targets are met;
• Contribution to the documentation of internal localisation quality processes and knowledge base maintenances, in cooperation with the Quality Manager;
• Apply existing market and language knowledge and expertise to provide proactive localisation consultancy to the business to help ensure the localized content is locally relevant to the Italian market and drive market localisation opportunities collaborating with relevant stakeholders across the company;
• Work closely with key stakeholders, also at every stage of the copy/content creation process, as needed by providing local market insights and consultancy;
• Lead key market research such as competitor analysis, localisation SWOT analysis, market research and support local language copy AB testing. Apply available market insights, findings and localisation data in daily work to support company and regional localisation strategy in the Italian market;
• Support the Quality Management team, Localisation Program Office and Hub Manager with regional and global quality-related initiatives;
• Own checking the quality of the language test, creating training resources for internal and external linguists and sharing regular feedback on their quality as per applicable quality framework during and after external and internal linguists' hiring;
• Cooperate with the Quality Manager and support the development and execution of quality improvement programmes;
• Optimizing existing quality processes for Italian, initiating and implementing new ways to improve the team's work to support quality;
• Proactively sourcing for insights and current trends in the local market and field of localisation quality management and technologies and identifying opportunities to apply gained knowledge within the team and localisation track;

• Bachelor Degree in Language, Translation, or related field
• Min. 5 years of experience in the localisation industry
• min. 5 years experience in translation, transcreation, audiovisual translation and/or writing localized copy for the Italian market and or managing the localisation quality of Italian
• Native level Italian speaker with excellent knowledge of spoken and written English
• Experience in QA testing or Linguistic QA management;
• Experience in quality management including revision, editing, giving and receiving feedback on translation quality to internal and external linguists
• Terminology management for Italian
• Excellent proficiency with at least 1 translation management software
• MT post-editing
• Analytical skills and ability to interpret available quality and localisation data and market insights to support and maintain quality in Italian
• Excellent communication and networking skills with a strong ability to influence different stakeholders (virtually and in person)
• Proactive and initiative taker, both when working independently and in collaboration with a team;
• Stakeholder and vendor management
• Ability to provide quality coaching and continuous feedback effectively and objectively
• Understanding of internationalization, SEO, e-commerce, UX and marketing techniques
• Teamwork and ability to cooperate effectively with a local and international global team
• Prior experience as a Senior Localisation Specialist, Quality Manager or related roles is a plus
• Experience with e-commerce product localisation and marketing and creative content translation and transcreation is a plus