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Localization Services: Ultimate Guide for Business Growth

Global trade—especially over the internet—is booming. Smart business owners know that if they want to connect with new markets, now is the time to reach out.
Rodrigo Demetrio
14 min

Localization Services: Ultimate Guide for Business Growth

Global trade—especially over the internet—is booming. Smart business owners know that if they want to connect with new markets, now is the time to reach out. Of course, it’s not as simple as just opening up overseas shipping channels. If you want to make a genuine splash in new markets, you’ll have to recreate your business in every locale you enter—localization services are the key to making that happen. Unfortunately, a lot of business owners make the mistake of underestimating the scope of such a strategy. Localization involves much more than simple translation or website updates; it’s a comprehensive program that requires ongoing, consistent management.

Managing Total Localization Services for Businesses

Localization is the process of getting your business—and all its content—ready for a new market. Companies have many factors to consider, but three major categories will require a keen focus: content, marketing, and products.

Content - Content is an extensive category for any business. It covers everything from internal communications with workers to customer service scripts, manuals, and other collateral materials. Content localization services for enterprises need to be able to manage a variety of mediums and subjects, including providing support for video and audio files in addition to text-based content. Learn More

Marketing - Marketing needs to be a top priority when managing a presence in international locations. It’s the differentiating factor that will draw individuals to your product or service, so it needs to mesh with their cultures. Good marketing translation services don’t just translate your words; they update your intent to engage new users and convert them to clients. Learn More

Products - Product localization services are essential if you want users in the new market to use your software, app, or offline product. However, there is a significant challenge here as translation happens independently of the code that manages your product. As a result, when it’s re-uploaded in the new language, it breaks and damages the user experience. Learn More

These three broad areas of focus require careful consideration in any localization strategy. If not, you may fail to engage potential clients, make your content challenging to navigate, or disappoint customers with your products. Also, a poor localization effort could damage your company culture by making employees in secondary markets feel less important. By focusing on your user experience, you can ensure better management of all three localization segments.

Building a Better User Experience

When it comes to transferring the user experience to a new market, many companies fall flat, treating their secondary languages as an afterthought and failing to provide equal opportunities to their new users. For example, let’s say a new user who speaks Spanish wants the entire suite of software products in their native language, but they don’t want to hunt down the content they need within an English version of the product. Streamlined software localization services will help provide that experience. The better user experience should also apply to your internal workers. Corporate communications and documents should default to each employee’s preferred language, and onboarding information and training programs must fit within each of their cultures while still making them feel like part of the organization. Both document and elearning localization services can also help to support recruiting efforts in international locations.


eLearning - eLearning localization entails translating and adjusting training content for a specific culture and language. eLearning localization is a necessary component of any international employee training program. While businesses and economies become increasingly globalized, businesses need personnel all over the world to execute business operations. From technical issues to customer care, this training means creating a suite of materials in their native language that customizes your company culture, values, and expectations. Learn More

Software - Software localization is the process of modifying user experience to meet the end user in their language and culture. Software localization has a number of advantages such as building a wider reach, generating higher user engagement, and developing a global presence. Reaping these benefits comes from making a long term commitment to successful localization, approaching the process with flexibility, and strategically setting goal markers and deadlines to meet realistic expectations. Learn More

Application - App localization is an ongoing project to change and refine an application to appeal to a culturally and linguistically specific target market. There are a number of challenges that come with app localization including proper QA, juggling multiple app stores, and identifying a repeatable process for version updates. App localization comes with a number or rewards including new market acquisitions, higher customer satisfaction, and an improved conversion rate. Learn More

Websites - Website localization is one of the most ROI beneficial expansions you could pursue. Through strategic targeting and a focused audience a website can spread messaging on products and services to significantly larger audiences. Website messaging is constantly being updated so setting up for success through the proper integrations and connectors is vital. By taking a total approach to complete website translation by supporting a continuous process allows for replication with other languages, cleaner workflows, and speedier delivery. Learn More

These three broad areas of focus require careful consideration in any localization strategy. If not, you may fail to engage potential clients, make your content challenging to navigate, or disappoint customers with your products. Also, a poor localization effort could damage your company culture by making employees in secondary markets feel less important. By focusing on your user experience, you can ensure better management of all three localization segments.

It’s essential to consider a few different aspects that will impact internal and external users’ experiences:

  • Variables: Establishing the correct variables in the code will ensure that times, dates, and currencies always fit the local market.
    Color scheme: Not all colors resonate in cultures the same way. Red may feel aggressive on an American website, but in many Asian countries, it’s considered a sign of good luck and used heavily.
  • Color scheme: Not all colors resonate in cultures the same way. Red may feel aggressive on an American website, but in many Asian countries, it’s considered a sign of good luck and used heavily.
  • Corporate lexicons: Every company has its own language, whether it’s branded terms, preferred vernacular, or technical jargon. This terminology requires mapping to similar words in other languages.
  • Cultural fit: Sometimes, translated content doesn’t spark the same emotional reaction in internal and external communications. Word-for-word translation tends to come off as very formal. It’s vital to have an in-country reviewer take a look to determine a cultural match.
  • Formatting: Building a buffer into text boxes will ensure the support of languages where text expands. This strategy helps to prevent abnormal line breaks, widows, and orphans—aka awkward paragraph breaks—on the page.
  • Code integrity: Translation may include the use of new characters that are misread as code. To combat this, you should run any content through machine translation first to see where the code issues may occur during localization.
  • Multimedia support: Many businesses focus strictly on text content, overlooking their video and audio files’ needs. Your foreign language users should be able to enjoy these mediums as well, whether you support them through voice-overs or subtitles.

The right firm will help you prepare for all of these potential content issues. They won’t just translate content; they’ll use preview screens, QA processes, and other tools to ensure the user experience remains high in every market.

Localization Tools to Consider

Because localization is such a broad process, you’ll need a lot more than simple translation services. Ideally, you’ll want to use a series of collaborative tools that support end-to-end localization services.


Rest API - Rest API is an interactive, easy-to-use option for working with a localization platform. It allows the user to set jobs, establish crawlers for sites, and automate uploads with ease.

Command-Line Interfaces (CLI) - Command-line interfaces are the best tools for developers who want to manage the localization process. They can customize their commands and programs for all necessary tasks to update content.

Connectors - Connectors are a method of attaching one program to another, like attaching the translation platform to the content management system. This automates uploading, supports reporting, and helps leaders keep an eye on their ROI.

Machine Translation - Machine translation can be a valuable tool for controlling costs and testing strategies. The right program will slowly learn the language of a corporation and use it to make better, more accurate text predictions.

Encryption - Many translation programs lack the security needed to keep business documents safe. A collaborative platform with automatic encryption adds a layer of confidentiality and keeps information out of the hands of bad actors.

Compliance - Often, business documents require specific regulatory controls to ensure appropriate information use. In some cases, compliance automation can provide enforced protocols and protect information.

Access Control - Many localization programs depend on email to send documents back and forth, but this approach offers excessive access. Good programs allow leaders to limit who can open files based on credentials or location.

IP Tracking - IP tracking is an everyday staple of many programs given leaders’ desire to monitor the use of their data. Immutable IP logs allow leaders to see where information is accessed and when.

Reporting - A localization platform can help business leaders decide on better investment regions when combined with the proper reporting templates and metrics—the more granular the reporting, the better.

AI-Based Assignments - Time is often wasted when finding and vetting linguists. Using a program that leverages the prior performance metrics of linguists and their specific skill sets to match them to jobs helps streamline the hiring process.

Translation Memory™ - Translation memories support machine translation and other computer-aided linguistic programs. Ideally, the company should offer a buildable and portable TM to provide better results with every single job.

Real-Time Platforms - Project management is a significant part of localization, but it can be challenging to juggle many different tasks. A collaborative platform helps managers check on projects’ work statuses in real-time and communicate with linguists.

The right localization management platform can simplify the entire process by offering an all-inclusive place to manage translation, review results, and control uploading. This strategy is vital regardless of whether a leader chooses to take a structured approach or embrace continuous localization.

Structured vs. Continuous Localization

There are two prevailing strategies when it comes to localization. The first is a structured approach where all tasks happen manually, and the second leverages automation to submit and upload documents without the need for human intervention. Both have their negative and positive aspects:


Structured

Pros

•  Control:
The structured approach where all uploads are manually performed provides significant control over every step •  Upfront cost: It’s much less costly to implement an initial structured program since costs are piecemealed •  Flexibility: When using manual methods, it’s easy to change direction in the midst of a project. Adding a new language is as simple as assigning a new job. Learn More

Cons

•  Time:
Manual management is a significant, long-term time investment, often requiring an entire localization team •  Out-of-date content: As the project manager must monitor origin content manually, it’s challenging to consistently keep it up to date •  Long-term costs: As the program grows into new markets, it can be incredibly challenging to manage it without skilled workers’ assistance. This can cause scope and cost creep. Learn More

Choosing between these two types will depend on the resources you have available. However, there is a third option—a hybrid continuous approach.

This approach allows for the oversight of a structured strategy while establishing the seamless plans of a continuous one. Localization management platforms connect all the managers directly to their linguists for clear oversight; jobs are triggered based on changes and documents are uploaded automatically, though the manager always has the opportunity to resolve problems before the content goes live.

Many firms that provide localization services only offer either a structured or continuous approach without a hybrid strategy. However, this “either-or” solution might not be the best if you’re looking for total end-to-end management for your business. The hybrid localization process is far more efficient in driving long-term business growth, which should always be the ultimate goal when choosing localization services.

Maximizing your ROI involves leveraging automation and various industry-tested tools to provide the best experience for internal and external users. You can control the total content ecosystem and enter new markets far more efficiently with such a hybrid strategy. If you’re considering an expansion into new markets, a technology-driven approach that leverages hybrid continuous localization is your best possible option.

Bureau Works offers localization services for businesses through a hybrid approach that fully manages the entire content ecosystem. Reach out below to get more information about our localization offerings.

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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

  1. What is collaborative translation?
  2. Why seamless translation collaboration is important
  3. 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.
Redokun Document Detail Page
  • 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.
How to invite translators to Redokun

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.
Collaboration feature in Redokun
  • 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.
Redokun glossary feature preview

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

Rodrigo Demetrio
Steering the marketing ship at Bureau Works with 17+ years of MarTech under my belt, I transform mere ideas into tangible realities. Passionate about languages and their power to build bridges, let's build a new one?
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