Best Practices

Develop Your Product Globalization Strategy for Sustainable Success

There are far more ways to get it wrong than there are ways to get it right when launching a localized product overseas. So, statistically speaking, you’re more likely to land on the wrong side of the equation.

Gabriel Fairman

2 min

We have worked with countless enterprises that have come to us for help AFTER a global launch misfire. And in all cases, we can point to what the companies did wrong.

More often than not, it was a lack of planning, and these foundational mistakes can trigger a cascade of problems. A lot of companies think, Oh, we’ll figure that out later, without realizing how the lack of preparation can end up being more costly down the road.

That’s why the time you spend developing your product globalization strategy is so critical.In fact, beyond just avoiding issues along the way, your systems have to be strong and smart and flexible enough to scale with your company’s progress. It’s not enough for your strategy to be ready for a first-round adaptation of your product; the ecosystem itself needs to be ready to adapt for future growth, evolution, and world domination. And that includes your translation management tools, your linguistic assets, your translators, your editors, your reviewers, your developers, and your product. You need an ongoing commitment from everyone involved to be a part of the solution.

Get Serious About Your Product Globalization Strategy

The boss is the money. If you’re not on the edge of your seat, listening to a localization expert, we know, at least, you’ll listen to your investors. They want it all done quickly so you can launch and start profiting from wealthy new markets. But read between the lines: they also want it done right.Failing at launch or failing a year after a successful launch because you inadvertently squandered your resources is still failure. The systems you invest in now can set you up for sustainable success. So, how should you go about strategizing for product globalization and localization?

Align Your Team

The goal here is to align your team, not your teams. When it comes time for localization, we have to stress how important it is for everyone to be on the same page and working toward the same goals.

The right hand might know what he is doing, and the left hand might know exactly what she is doing, but if they don’t know what each other is doing— Well, you end up investing resources to reinvent the wheel, and you miss golden opportunities to share knowledge and progress.It’s true that everyone should be a leader for their own area of expertise, but that should go hand-in-hand with collaboration toward shared goalposts.

The fate of product globalization rests on so many shoulders, and if those individuals aren’t in sync and their shoulders deviate, the product falls. And it may be prohibitively complicated to reassemble the splinters. So, you have to get everyone’s buy-in from the start. That includes developers and other creatives. Everyone involved should understand how their responsibilities contribute to the whole. A developer’s small choices for defining variables can have a huge impact on a translator’s ability to adapt a string for the best user experience—which is what matters in the end. All around, best practices need to be systematized to support the whole.

Commit to Preparation

For a system of localization to be successful and sustainable over the long term, you can’t skimp on the strategy and preparation. You need to have a clear understanding upfront of the various players on your localization team, the various types of content that will be flowing through your system, and the style and terminology guidelines that will preserve your brand and product integrity as you break into new languages and markets.In fact, this is also the best time to work on aligning your team and identifying those goals that will guide each action along the localization workflow.

The initial phase of product globalization tends to be very engineer focused and fast moving. But you need to anticipate that the engineers will eventually be handing off their creations to a localization team that may not have engineering experience. That hand-off needs to be handled strategically so that the players who will be knee-deep in the system’s process understand, from the inside out, the architecture of your solution. Don’t cut corners during these knowledge transfers.

Identify Your Sources of Authority

Another cohort you need to dial in to your best practices will be the reviewers who contribute to quality management. You need to think carefully about who will be the authority in your company. Because the language on the user’s screen is essentially your product, we can’t underestimate how critical are language adaptation and quality. Yes, your back-end code needs to be seamless, but that is not really what the user sees.

The language is what really characterizes the user experience, and you need trusted insiders to be the gatekeepers of that experience.During your planning stages, develop a clear set of expectations and a system of tracking so that you can lean on the data for evolving content quality. Commitment to standardization is what will empower reviewers to be consistent in their actionable feedback—and to ensure consistency in the end content.

Take Responsibility for Translators’ Success

As complex as this ecosystem will be, your early commitment to product globalization strategy allows you to proactively manage everyone’s contributions, including the translators’. Sure, it’s important to approach the translator search carefully, but it’s even more important to set all of your translators up for success from the beginning.

Even the best translator won’t produce exactly what you want if you haven’t given them the necessary resources to do so.Be ready to sit down and demo your software for each translator. Click through everything in the product to illustrate the user experience so that they have complete context for what they are translating and why. Likewise, your developers need to be looking out for the translators too. UX context is one thing, but translators also need very clear details about all of the minute variables they’ll be handling among the content strings. Developers need to be naming placeholders in ways that translators can understand—and with an understanding of the nuances of translation.

Get Serious About Sustainable Localization Success

This brings us full-circle to the issue of team alignment. Your developers need to take responsibility for discerning internationalization; they need to understand their part in supporting the translators’ success. Translators, editors, and reviewers need to have a strong collaborative approach in order to expand efficiencies and overall product quality.

Creativity is no excuse for neglecting to support teammates’ success since the end goals really are the same.Remember that the boss is the money. And the money wants you to do it right, to do it efficiently, and to set yourself up for long-term success. But what’s money-driven on the outside is actually more sensitive and more human on the inside.

In practice, you’re assigning your team to be proactive advocates for each other and contributors to the interdependent ecosystem. Product globalization is much more about the people—the end users, translators, engineers and developers, reviewers, editors, and managers—than it is about the product.

The people make global growth possible; and they also create the obstacles that prevent it. Commit to your product globalization strategy now, and secure your path to expansion without boundaries.

‍It is as complicated as it sounds, but once you dig your teeth into the strategy and the system, it all becomes much more digestible. Bureau Works specializes in mobilizing all team players for localization and gathering them in one centralized platform to share knowledge and to streamline workflows.Contact our team to get an idea of how the BWX technologies and translators can reinforce your product globalization strategy.

Collaborative translation is a powerful tool for your business if you’re looking to expand to new global markets. By coordinating a team of professionals who work together in real-time, you can quickly deliver high quality translations that resonate with local audiences.

But what if you don't know how to synchronize a large team's efforts? Or are you‌ struggling to find the right software for a well-coordinated translation process? Well, look no further! In this guide, you'll learn all the know-how's of collaborative translation to bring your brand to global audiences.

Overview

What is collaborative translation?
Why seamless translation collaboration is important
Best practices for collaborative translation and global market success

What is collaborative translation?

Collaborative translation is when multiple people simultaneously work together to translate content. A collaborative translation process often makes use of specialized tools and software to make sure the translation is quick, accurate, and consistent.

Example: Let's say you're a B2B SaaS company looking to translate your marketing materials into a new language to connect with potential clients abroad. Use collaborative translation to bring together translators, developers, and other specialists to translate content into many languages at once.

Your team can use a collaborative translation platform like Redokun to work on projects simultaneously. A coordinated workflow will make sure that your translations use the same terminology and style, improving the quality of the translated product for your target audiences.

Collaborative Translation vs. Crowdsourcing

People often confuse collaborative translation with crowdsourcing and think the two are the same. However, these approaches to translation are different.

Crowdsourcing is when a large group of people contributes translations, often through an open call or invitation by a company or author. Brands can turn to crowdsourcing, community translation, or volunteer translation when they are looking to reduce costs and accelerate the process, especially for large multi-language projects.

In crowdsourced translations, the contributors can be volunteer translators, subject matter experts, or just anonymous individuals online. In other words, you may not know who's worked on the translation and what their qualifications are. It makes crowdsourcing distinct from collaborative translation, where the team would be an established group of professionals you've selected

Why seamless translation collaboration is important

As a busy B2B/B2C marketing manager or project manager, you might ask yourself: Isn't the "divide and conquer" a better strategy when working on a translation or localization project? It seems logical that each project team member, including translators, designers, and editors, works on their tasks separately and step by step.

However, collaborative translation can help your team reap many benefits compared to a traditional approach to translation projects:

Reasons why seamless translation collaboration is important

Produce high-quality translations consistently. When your whole team works on a translation project simultaneously on one platform, it's easier to stay in context and keep track of the translation accuracy for every target language. On top of that, your team can conduct agile QA throughout the project cycle.
‍Faster turnaround times. By working together, your team can complete projects faster and more efficiently. Centralization saves a lot of time at every stage of translation. And since your team can work on more than one translation at a time, you can publish your translated content in several new markets at once.
‍Reduced costs. You get to improve efficiency while working with a smaller team of translators. The smaller and more coordinated the team, the less the risk of costly translation errors. It means reduced translation costs and better project budget compliance.
‍Increased flexibility. Collaborative translation allows your team to produce translations into many languages at once and easily make changes to any project document. You can conveniently engage in a feedback loop and guarantee a continuous localization process.
‍Better communication. Collaborative translation effectively brings all members of your localization team together on one platform. It helps you make sure that everyone is working toward the same goals ‌and simplifies overall localization management.

Six best practices for collaborative translation and global market success

To be great at collaborative translation, you need to approach it strategically. Even if you've never used this approach before, you can follow the six steps below to build an efficient collaborative translation workflow. And if you're already familiar with this method, these practices will help you improve the way you collaborate on any translation projects.

Six best practices for collaborative translation for your global business success

1. Work out a detailed project plan

Before you start working on translations together, you need a clear-cut project plan. You should first identify the following items.

Project timeline: Define crucial deadlines, project milestones, and the overall project duration.
Translation volume and key deliverables: Calculate the general word count, and determine the workload for every language pair if you translate into multiple languages.
Project budget: Keep in mind possible added and hidden translation costs.
Project team: Define what kind of specialists you need: translators, editors, proofreaders, etc. Will you need to find external translators? Consider all your HR needs in advance.
Your approach to the translation process: How much do you want to rely on machine translation? At what point will you edit translated strings? Answer all these questions before you go on.
Quality assurance protocol: Establish an efficient QA procedure for all the language pairs you're working on.

It may sound like a handful but the more detailed the plan, the more streamlined the translations will be down the road. Besides, you can already use Redokun to boost this stage of the localization process!

Redokun is a translation management system you can use to automate, coordinate, and optimize your translation processes from content creation to publication.

Redokun simplifies your project planning. In particular, you can use the tool to:

Monitor your ongoing translations easily. Keep track of all of your translation files and projects across multiple languages in one space, and check their progress at a glance.

Meet deadlines with digest emails. Redokun will send you daily or weekly email digests to update you on the progress of translations. From there, you can initiate one-click reminders to your translators who are potentially falling behind schedule.
Making budget planning easier. Redokun has a transparent, scalable pricing structure that will cover exactly the volume of work your project needs.

Redokun is an easy-to-use tool that requires no onboarding. Your team can start using all the system’s features right away. During your project planning stage, you won’t need to factor in a lengthy training period to introduce team members to the tool.

2. Divide tasks and assign responsibilities the smart way

Good collaboration is impossible without a well-planned distribution and organization of roles and tasks. Ensure that every team member is on the same page and understands their respective responsibilities.

For example, the project managers should divide ‌translation tasks among translation team members according to their language proficiency, area of expertise, or subject matter knowledge.

On Redokun, you can invite translators to work on different language pairs and content types depending on their skills. All you need to do is enter the translator's email. The software will send them an email invitation and let you know once they've started translating the file.
You can also invite several translators to work on one document.

To maximize the efficiency of project management and task division, establish a clear structure of your workflow. Make sure all your pages, files, and folders are well organized and team members know where to find necessary resources for their respective tasks. A centralized, cloud-based storage for all your documents is a must.

Redokun is a cloud-based software that makes file management easy. You can create folders and customize permission settings for multiple users for better organization. No more need to look for spreadsheets and lost documents scattered around different digital locations.
Don't forget to make the most of the Reporting Dashboard. It shows you the status of the translation project and helps you see how users distribute tasks (for example, what methods they use to translate different content segments).

Redokun Dashboard with translation statistics

3. Enhance the collaborative translation process with clear communication

It's important to have open communication channels among all team members in your translation project, including internal and external translators. For a successful collaboration effort, you need a shared communication space to:

Conduct regular check-ins.
Discuss translation options and other aspects of the working process.
Update and adjust requirements and guidelines.
Maintain feedback loops.

It's up to you to choose between email, messengers, or tools like Google Drive or Slack to keep your collboarative operations flowing. However, using multiple channels for different aspects of the project can get messy. It's harder to manage your team and make sure all collaborators are up to date on the ongoing translation tasks.

You can avoid these potential problems by centralizing all your communications and project management. With translation software like Redokun, you can manage, translate, communicate, and collaborate — all in one place.

Translate content in context. Your translators or editors can use page previews in Web Editor to understand the context of the text while working on it.
Work together in real-time. Use Redokun as a full-scale collaborative translation platform. It enables real-time cooperation among your team members, improving efficiency and reducing communication errors.
Use comments, mentions, and notifications to exchange feedback quickly. Redokun's Web Editor is a convenient place to stay in touch and discuss your translation progress every step of the way.

Create a hybrid workflow. Work with your in-house teams or external translators to suit different localization project formats and scalability needs.

4. Use machine translation and translation memory tools

Computer-assisted translation tools are a great addition to human translation. Machine translation (MT) helps your collaborators speed up the localization process by automating translation. Of course, it doesn't have the quality of a human professional translation — it’s more like a helping hand that's always there to facilitate the translation of complex phrases or new terms.

Redokun is integrated with two Machine Translation tools: Google Translate and DeepL. Translation suggestions by these two tools pop up right below where the translator should key in the translation, as shown here.

To enhance collaboration even further, consider using translation memory tools. They ensure consistency and save translation software users a lot of time.

Translation memory (TM) is a translation technology that stores previously translated sentences or phrases as segments and creates a unique database for your localization projects. You can reuse your translation to increase efficiency and consistency in ongoing and future translations.

With Redokun as your collaborative translation platform, you can leverage TM to:

Consistently translate any repeated word, phrase, or sentence across different language pairs and documents. It's especially important for translating technical terms, marketing slogans, CTAs, and other catchphrases. Translation memory helps you stay consistent in your marketing messaging.
Pre-translate your entire documents. Combine TM matches from your previous translations with Machine Translation to get a fully pre-translated document even before your team gets to work.
Manage your translation memory database. Import and customize your TM database to further improve translation quality and consistency.

”The speed of translation is quite impressive in that it doesn’t take [much time], maybe a couple of minutes when you translate from English to eight markets. I think that’s what I’m most impressed by.”

Read more about how Kenni and the marketing team at Rockfon increased their translation productivity by 70% using translation memories and other Redokun features here.

5. Use glossaries and style guides

Glossaries and style guides are valuable resources your team can use for reliable reference.

A glossary is a list of terms and their corresponding translations that are specific to a company or industry.

A style guide outlines the preferred tone, voice, and style for a company's marketing materials across markets and languages.

Your collaborators can refer to these resources when they’re not sure about a translation. For example is when they're deciding how to translate a company abbreviation, whether to the Oxford comma, or choosing the right tone to address customers, etc. No more ambiguity about linguistic, stylistic, and cultural aspects of your translations.

Use Redokun's glossary feature to create a glossary and style guide that outlines rules for spelling, grammar, punctuation, terminology, and tone specific to your project.

6. Continuously review and revise

A key benefit of a collaborative translation platform is the ability to review and revise translations in an agile and efficient manner. By involving multiple specialists in the process of editing and QA, you can guarantee accuracy and consistency in the translated content at every stage of the project.

To implement effective review and revision procedures in your collaborative translation projects, it is important to:

Plan for review and revision in advance. Identify who will be responsible, set the timeline, and use specific tools.
Consider involving in-country reviewers who are familiar with the local market and culture to ensure that the translations are accurate and appropriate for the target audience.
Perform regular QA checks. They should include consistency in terminology and formatting, and verify that the translations are free from grammatical errors and typos.

Pro-tip: Ever experienced the headache of having to update a translation that’s already 70% done when there is a last-minute change to the source document?

With Redokun’s revision feature, you don’t have to spend hours poring over Excel sheets and comparing files to spot the places where new words have been added or sentences have been changed. Just upload the latest document version and the system will identify new text that needs translating — saving your team’s time and effort while keeping previous translations intact.

Summary

Collaborative translation is an excellent approach if you want to improve the consistency of your translations, reduce costs, and establish a strong presence in global markets.

The key to seamless collaboration is a combination of careful planning, role distribution, agile QA, and smart use of translation software.

Make Redokun part of your collaborative translation efforts and enhance the pace of your global business growth‌. Start your 14-day free trial today and benefit from a quicker and more streamlined translation workflow.

Till next time,

Anastasia

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