I run M21Global, a translation and localisation company I co-founded in 2005 and have helped run for most of the time since. I am not a developer by training. My degree is in public relations and media studies, from the University of Exeter, and for most of my career my job was the business of translation: clients, quality, the team, the deadlines.
That changed when generative AI started taking the work. Rather than wait to see how far it would go, I used it to rebuild the company instead: the AI writes the code; I decide what it builds, and I answer for what ships. Over the past two years I have rebuilt M21’s production engine around large language models, on my own: a multi-model translation pipeline with a consensus loop, automated quality estimation running on a GPU of my own, deterministic safeguards, and the grading system that decides which segments a human still needs to see. It runs in production, on real client work, measured against what our reviewers actually change.
This site is where I write about that, in the open. The real method, the real code, the failures included. I write it first here and syndicate the business half to LinkedIn. The audience I have in mind is the one I belong to: people running language companies through this shift, and people building production systems with LLMs who want more than a demo.
I am based in Lisbon. I run, currently training toward a marathon, which is the closest thing I have to a method for hard problems: keep going when it stops being comfortable. I speak Portuguese and English fluently, French and Spanish enough to get by.
If any of this is useful to you, or you want to compare notes, I am easiest to reach on LinkedIn or by email at me@diogoheleno.com.