At Awin, the words were moving. The work was getting stuck. Six teams at the affiliate marketing business produced content in eight languages, using a patchwork that included spreadsheets, ChatGPT, DeepL and Asana. Engineering worked in Lokalise. Other departments had their own arrangements. There was plenty of technology in the building. There was also a backlog.
- Acclaro sells translation expertise and the systems that move content through a business.
- Its customers include Microsoft, Adobe and Awin.
- The useful lesson: fix handoffs before adding another tool.
Previous agencies had struggled with Awin’s specialist terminology. Acclaro brought experience with Lokalise and a centralized workflow. Its account reports 57% faster turnaround and 70-80% less internal review time. Those are vendor-reported results. Still, the interesting detail comes before the percentages: a company could own several ways to translate and remain slow at getting translations published.
01 / The work around the words
Acclaro occupies that awkward space between having a sentence in another language and having a business ready for another market. It translates websites, software, support material, campaigns and training content. It also manages the surrounding work: integrations, terminology, linguistic review, testing and the traffic between departments. The customer buys a functioning process as well as translated copy.
That distinction matters to a product manager with frequent releases, a marketing team coordinating campaigns, or a support operation updating technical instructions. Each has different deadlines and consequences for error. A translation can be grammatically sound and still be wrong for a button, a brand voice or the screen where a customer encounters it.
The business is paid enterprise services supported by technology, with programs shaped around content and delivery requirements. A buyer is scoping languages, formats, integrations and review effort. The practical cost question includes the employee hours spent checking, moving and repairing content, alongside the translation bill. Awin’s review-time figure makes that hidden labor unusually visible.
02 / A merger with a working engine
Michael Kriz founded Acclaro in 2002. In February 2024, it merged with Jonckers in a transaction supported by Mayfair Equity Partners, Jonckers’ majority shareholder. The combination joined Acclaro’s localization and cultural adaptation work with an AI-enabled language services business that had already built WordsOnline, its cloud translation platform, in 2016.
The merger announcement described complementary technology and geographic reach, alongside shared research and development. It named customers including Amazon, Microsoft, Adobe, Life360, Wish and Notion. The logic was practical: combine the machinery for processing large volumes with the specialists who understand what those volumes contain. By September 2026, Mayfair was identified as Acclaro’s majority investor.
“Translation makes content understood. Content intelligence makes it work with impact.”Sahil Rishi, Group President / September 2026
Rishi became the company’s most senior executive that month, succeeding Russell Haworth, who stepped down as CEO. The vocabulary of “content intelligence” signals a wider ambition: helping content perform across markets. It also raises the standard by which buyers should judge the work. Publishing more words is useful only if the experience improves.
03 / Don’t send every sentence down the same pipe
One Acclaro ecommerce case offers a pleasingly small clue to a large problem. Product titles do not behave like ordinary sentences. They string together attributes. The company built a custom neural machine translation engine for that structure, while evaluating third-party engines for descriptions and support material. Highly nuanced marketing went to in-country linguists.
That is a useful rule to steal. Sort content before automating it. Repetitive descriptions, persuasive headlines and legal language carry different demands. Acclaro’s August 2026 Augmented Translation launch formalized a layered approach: adaptive machine translation, AI post-editing, AI quality estimation and human quality checks. The company says model selection considers content type, industry, language pair and historical translation data.
- 01Machine
translation - 02AI
post-editing - 03AI quality
estimation - 04Human
checks
Microsoft provides the volume test. Acclaro’s published account describes technical support articles, security notes, white papers and social content across 47 languages. WordsOnline and machine translation with post-editing support the operation. The case reports localization cost reductions exceeding 50%. That is a reported relative saving for this program, rather than a price a new customer can assume.
04 / Video brings its own traffic jam
Text is only part of the job. Adobe’s video work required localized graphics, on-screen language and native-speaking voice talent under tight deadlines. A translated script leaves quite a to-do list. The graphics must fit. The voice must sound appropriate. The finished asset must retain the brand’s character.
Acclaro launched Multimedia Orchestration in May 2026 to coordinate video, audio and imagery. The offering brings together subtitling, dubbing, voiceover, lip syncing and creative asset localization, with workflows ranging from human-led to AI-automated. Its promise rests on managing the dependencies between those tasks. Faster transcription has limited value if the finished video waits for every other component.
05 / The integration needs an owner
Acclaro’s market position combines language services with workflow engineering. Its partnerships help explain that position. The company announced a Lokalise partnership in 2020. In March 2025, it and Phrase announced a jointly funded Solutions Architect role. Two businesses paid for a person to bridge their offerings. The connector was useful; someone still needed to design the solution around it.
For a buyer, this suggests a sensible starting exercise: map one piece of content from creation to local publication. Mark every transfer, approval and correction. Then decide which work needs automation and which needs judgment. A slogan with cultural nuance or a high-consequence instruction calls for more scrutiny than predictable catalog text. Treating both alike can erase the savings in rework.
Acclaro makes most sense where language work repeats, crosses teams and touches several systems. A small, occasional translation may need a simpler arrangement. But when content keeps changing, the route it travels becomes part of the product. That is the space Acclaro sells: all the decisions required before the words can do their job.