🔥1,180
💎9,420 XP
❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️
🌐 AR · EN · FR
Localization Manager
John Watson
📍 Beirut, Lebanon
🎯 Daily goal
I run localization for products shipping in Arabic, English, and French. Over 6 years I have taken 3 apps from English-only to full right-to-left support, and I keep a translation memory that now sits at 62% reuse across teams.
Most of my week is spent between terminology reviews, vendor timelines, and the occasional argument about how to say "streak" in Levantine Arabic. I like the argument.
Weekly localization goal840 / 1,000 XP
4,100 strings reviewed this quarter · 96% on-time delivery
🧩 Skill tree
👑RTL layout
Level 5 · legendary
👑Term management
Level 5 · legendary
🗺️ Lesson path
👑💼
Localization Manager
· CedarLingo
2022 – present
Unit 4 · Beirut
- Lead a team of 6 across Arabic, French, and English for a mobile learning app with 1.4M monthly users.
- Cut average string turnaround from 9 days to 3 by rebuilding the vendor handoff into a single weekly batch.
- Raised translation-memory reuse from 41% to 62%, which trimmed roughly 18,000 EUR a year in vendor cost.
🌍
Senior Localization Specialist
· Qamar Software
2019 – 2022
Unit 3 · Beirut
- Shipped full right-to-left support for 2 products, covering 11,000 UI strings and 40 help-center articles.
- Built the first shared Arabic glossary, 900 terms, which dropped reviewer back-and-forth by about 30%.
📝
Translator & QA Reviewer
· Byblos Media House
2017 – 2019
Unit 2 · Beirut
- Translated and proofread around 300,000 words of marketing and legal copy between English, Arabic, and French.
- Set up a 3-stage QA checklist that brought client revision requests down to under 2%.
🌱
Junior Translator
· Freelance
2016 – 2017
Unit 1 · start here
- Handled 20 to 25 short jobs a month for 8 regular clients, mostly app store listings and subtitles.
🏆 Leaderboard
References available on request. XP shown is weeks we worked together.
1
Nadia Haddad Head of Product · CedarLingo
156 wks
2
Karim Sleiman Engineering Lead · Qamar Software
148 wks
3
Rita Abou-Zeid Editorial Director · Byblos Media House
104 wks
🎖️ Badges earned
🎓
MA, Translation & Interpreting
Lebanese American University · 2016
📚
BA, English Language
Université Saint-Joseph · 2014
✅
Localization Project Management
Certificate · 2021
🔤
memoQ & Trados certified
Advanced user · 2020