The Pivot Language Approach and Multilingual Localization Projects: How and When it Works
According to the Cambridge English Dictionary, pivot is “a fixed point supporting something which turns or balances, or a person or thing on which something else depends”. If we imagine for a moment the localization process as a mechanism, the source material will have the function of the pivot, because in every possible scenario, from AI-powered machine translation with post-editing to the good old translation and proofreading, the quality of the source material is the factor that will always dictate both the process efficiency and the ultimate quality of the localized materials, regardless of all the technical magic and linguistic knowledge involved.