If the head of a gaming company came to me and asked how to save money on localization instead of automatically going the “IA”/MT/LLM route, I would recommend to:

• Hire a linguistic consultant specialized in the medium to help plan the process and smooth out any possible issues before they become an issue.
• Hire a localization engineer with experience in translation software, preparing files for translation, and building terminology databases, and who knows how to fix these same stuff if something goes wrong.
• Hire a localization project manager with previous experience as a translator because they know how things usually go in the field, unlike project managers without translation experience.
• Do all of the above before production, or even pre-production, starts.
• Keep extensive documentation about the game’s design and share it with the translators.
• Have someone who can answer questions about the game.
• For the love of god, think about time zones.

Doing a bit of this prep work might seem expensive at the start, but it would save so much money in the long run while also making everyone’s life less miserable when dealing with the project.