loclait got a refresh! And now I’ll wax poetic about it for 500~ words.
Read this if you want, or don’t. Reject causality. Exercise your free will!
When I started loclait, like many freelancers, I romanticized the ‘collective’ vision. Equal say, equal stakes, all that jazz. Who doesn’t love a democracy?
We initially leaned into that. But as more projects came and went, the more it got sanded down by reality.
Eventually, a clearer vision crystallized.
That caused a stark mismatch between the image loclait projected and what it actually was. And the gap just kept widening. Fast-forward to 2026.
At a certain point, every agency has to decide between two business models:
- Do you want to be a broker?
- Do you want to be a team?
Collectives tend to start out as the latter, then often -as I see it- ‘degrade’ into the former once they’re big enough, diluted enough. That’s just the sad reality of economies of scale.
Though unlike the multilingual collectives that can’t verify or control the output of all their languages, imo, there’s really no excuse for single language providers to have middle management as their only added value. Especially if they charge for it.
loclait is now squarely at that intersection. And 3 years in, I know exactly what I want it to be.
The common thread between why our clients come to us has, weirdly enough, been me. Sure, we’ve got great people, a proven process, and the right track record. But none of it would have mattered had they not trusted my judgment of it all. That’s why “Collective” wasn’t it, and neither was “Team”, really.
loclait is just “me”. Me at scale. From day one, loclait was explicitly designed to scale and replicate exactly what I’m already doing. The exact process, the exact workflow, and the exact results.
If you know me, you know how much I love to optimize. But some things, as one tends to figure out sooner or later, shouldn’t be optimized.
I had always remained hands-on on every project: the lead editor, the sole style guide author, and the final onboarding filter.
And if the (rather abnormal considering how ‘invisible’ loc often is) volume of player praise our work gets means anything, it’s that this is clearly working—clearly the way to go.
And now, I’ll be jumping back into translation trenches after a two-year hiatus, tuning out the noise, and focusing on doing what I’ve always excelled at: iterating on what worked, ditching what didn’t, and continuously delivering better and better results.
I’m not gonna pull a “natural evolution” on you, but this refresh was truly long overdue. At last, the outside finally reflects the inside, and it feels just right.
By Seif Chaib.
Originally posted on Linkedin.