Chapter 3
The enterprise impact
When translation can’t scale, teams across the business hit an operational ceiling—restricting their ability to grow, impact, and deliver.
Timelines slip, costs rise, and functions are forced to narrow their ambitions—all symptoms of translation workflows that can’t keep up with modern content demands.
Everyone feels the strain, from marketing and customer support to legal, product, and engineering. Here’s how it surfaces across the enterprise:
Marketing
Launches get delayed, localization costs escalate, and messaging fragments, extending time to market and campaign impact.
Customer support
Multilingual communication becomes inconsistent and off-brand, driving higher per-ticket costs and lower satisfaction.
Legal
Review cycles lengthen, regulatory risk increases, and backlogs build, putting deals and customer relationships at risk.
Product and engineering
Global collaboration breaks down, talent supply narrows, and launches slow, undercutting the economies of scale these teams rely on.
LLM and Agentic AI adoption plans in 2026
UK: 0%
US: 0%
JP: 0%
FR: 0%
DE: 0%
Source: DeepL 2025 survey of global business executives
The impact of unscalable translation doesn’t appear evenly. It appears first where speed, volume, and risk collide, and where delays cost most.
In our survey, leaders point to three functions where the strain is already most visible, signalling where change is becoming unavoidable.
Where translation pressure is felt most
0%
believe sales & marketing would benefit from real-time, AI-powered translation
0%
see customer support as the business function being reshaped fastest by AI
0%
see content specialization in legal & finance as key for translation and localization
Source: DeepL 2025 survey of global business executives
