What I do is decide that I am in charge of defining the machine, and the tools implement the machine. The tools are a means to an end. If the tools don't exist to implement the machine, I write them. If they do exist, great.
I thought the same way except I was even more insane. I thought lets just teach everyone English and we won't have to do any internationalization/localization.
But seriously, in a lot of cases, translating and localizing is actually the easy part of internationalizing a business.
In my defence, I was not a very travelled child. I didn't even know about all the different kinds of power socket standards around the world.