Inside the Quadratic Localization Partnership Between Phrase, Acclaro, Sanity, and Braze

Introducing herself at SlatorCon London 2025’s Phrase Panel on Connected Ecosystems, Iara Altkorn, Localization Operations Lead at Braze, playfully acknowledged that her company is behind a number of household names, if not a household name itself.

“Maybe you don’t know who we are, but your marketing team definitely does,” Altkorn said of the customer engagement company.

Braze, which has 15 offices across the globe and operates in over 75, established its localization team just three years ago, with vocal support from the company’s CEO. 

Braze, the leading customer engagement platform that empowers brands to Be Absolutely Engaging™, recognized how important it was to optimize localization efforts. “We knew there was room for improvement when it came to meeting our customer’s needs in their language,” Altkorn described this period. Braze sought a localization vendor that could handle the scale of demand.

Russell Haworth, CEO of language solutions integrator (LSI) Acclaro, noted that in addition to Braze’s rapid expansion, the company had many different types of content and was moving into new markets.

Acclaro connected Braze with Phrase, a language technology platform (LTP). In doing so, Acclaro built a strong bridge between Braze’s short-term content translation needs and a longer-term solution. 

Phrase, in turn, helped Braze scale and was able to integrate with Sanity, the headless CMS solution Braze was already using. 

“We win together with that ecosystem,” Phrase CEO Georg Ell said of what he termed the “quadratic relationship” that developed. 

Customers, Capabilities, and Contributions

“It’s always about understanding the goals and then mapping the capabilities against those goals,” Ell explained. “It sounds obvious but, so often, I think, with technology vendors, it’s more of a push of, ‘Here’s what we can do.’” 

Ell has instead directed his team to start by asking for all of a customer’s objectives and key results (OKRs), at which point Phrase can map out, quarter by quarter, how the LTP can help.

For Braze, success meant data could flow successfully and seamlessly across multiple components, particularly by integrating with the necessary business outcome data, whether customer engagement rates or completion rates for learning, development, and certification content.

Since Braze was already working with Sanity on an existing project, the team decided to continue using the same flexible, API-first platform, which could integrate with Phrase without too much difficulty.

Rich Higgins, Senior Solutions Architect at Sanity, explained that Sanity sees itself as a “satellite member” of the team, making sure the editorial experience is strong within Sanity so content flows without friction.

“We keep in touch, we do onboarding sessions and monthly calls, and try and align with the quarterly objectives of the business that we’re working with,” Higgins said.

Acclaro’s role as LSI, beyond “advisor” and expert linguist manager, includes trying to ask the right questions, diagnose issues, and anticipate possible problems based on prior experience. When needed, Acclaro can also act as a liaison between Phrase and the client, Braze. In some cases, such as brainstorming with engineering teams on how to move content from point A to point B, this might mean working outside of the Phrase Platform. 

Braze similarly connects with partners to discuss not just needs, but also pain points, goals, and business expectations — conversations that could take place on or off the platform, or could start off-platform and move onto the platform.

“I think that kind of relationship is very open and it goes both ways,” Altkorn said. “It helps our partners take a seat at the table, […] and that opens the door also for creativity.”

Phrase has since co-invested with Acclaro in a “joint” solutions architect who splits their time between the companies — part of a move toward a more centralized approach involving multiple teams and greater visibility across the companies.

Scaling Fast and Speeding Up

As Braze’s localization team grew, so did the demand for its services. Braze’s content includes “a little bit of everything,” Altkorn said, from marketing materials and documentation to its website and the Braze platform itself.

One of the most important departments, however, is the customer education and certification team, which helps Braze customers enjoy the platform to the fullest.

Braze has been localizing Japanese content for certifications for over three years, with almost 3,000 registrations in that time. Today, more users in Japan access the content in Japanese, than the original in English.

“Japanese users know where to find our content, seamlessly, in their native language,” Altkorn noted. 

Building on that success story, and powered by the “quadratic relationship” Braze and its partners have established and nurtured, localization has become an invisible layer that speeds up such progress and helps the platform launch in new markets.

Braze launched Spanish “a bit over five months ago,” Altkorn said, and 800 users have already registered. 

Since 2024, when the integration with Phrase began, Braze has localized into five languages, resulting in 900 enrollments, 3,000 course completions in languages other than English, and 70,000 hours of engagement from just 46 hours of localized content. 

Ell pointed out that bringing down unit costs and improving time to delivery typically piques stakeholders’ interest in pursuing even more localization.

“They want to do more languages, more content types. If we’ve done marketing, ‘Let’s do learning and development.’ If we’ve done learning and development, ‘Let’s do sales material or contracts and legal,’” Ell said, adding that those additional use cases often appear as providers successfully integrate systems. 

That requires good foundations, the right tech stack, and a functioning ecosystem with reliable partners. 

While every market has its own nuances in terms of projects and content, Altkorn said, “We’re always ready now.”