How to adapt your content to the Spanish speakers growth
According to a research conducted by the Texas Demographic Center, the spanish speaking population in the state is growing - and fast. In fact, it will surpass Texas’ non-Hispanic White population as soon as 2022.
Rodrigo Demetrio
2 min
According to a research conducted by the Texas Demographic Center, the spanish speaking population in the state is growing - and fast. In fact, it will surpass Texas’ non-Hispanic White population as soon as 2022.
There are still no projections regarding when the spanish-speaking population will become the majority of the state. However, the consistent growth this group has presented throughout the years highlights some important facts. For example, the need to close Education Gaps.
What does having a growth on hispanic population mean?
The spanish-speaking growth means that the rate of bilingualism is also growing. That is because those people are fluent in Spanish, but also in English - the official language in the United States. The country has the second largest population of Spanish speaking people, losing just for Mexico. With almost 13% of its population speaking the language at home right now, it is expected that one in three people in the U.S. will speak Spanish by 2050.
Where are they?
The majority of the native English speaking people in Texas are concentrated in the Southeast and both coasts of the country. According to the Census Bureau’s 2019 American Community Survey, San Francisco Federal Reserve district has the largest population, with almost 18 million people. The district is followed by Dallas that has almost 11 million non-hispanic people.
In Dallas County, there are 1.1 million people speaking Spanish, while 2 million of those are in Harris County, in Houston. The research suggests that, by 2050, the hispanic population in Texas alone will surpass 20 million people. Spanish speaking people also represent 81% of the non-native English speakers in Dallas, the largest share in all districts. El Paso, where 59% of the non-native English population also speaks Spanish, and San Antonio (50%) complete the picture.
Benefits a spanish speaking population can bring
Many people know that being bilingual is good, but did you know that bilingualism can bring benefits to a country too? Here we listed a few of them!
Economic boost
The main benefit a bilingual population brings is a potential boost in the country’s economy. Let’s take Switzerland as an example. The country has four official languages (German, Italian, French and Romansh) and attributes 10% of its GDP to this fact.This happens because languages are responsible for building trade relations. Thus, creating better deals for the country and its economy.
Better Individual Earning Power
People that speak more than one language are most likely to be paid more than the monolingual population. A study conducted by the University of Florida found out that workers who speak Spanish gain $7,000 more (per year) than those who only speak English. To complement the research, the Dallas Fed conducted a study directed to Spanish-speaking people in the region.
The questionnaire had almost 400 participants and showed that they use the language extensively in their work routine. This shows the economic benefits attached to language skill. The study found out that Spanish is used primarily by managers and business owners. Agriculture, mineculture, manufacturing industries and B2C services are the ones that use Spanish the most.
Better Health
There is a number of evidence that shows that bilingualism is good for our brain and body health. For instance, it can help us delay the symptoms of dementia and to concentrate more. Other health benefits of speaking more than one language include better ability to process information and social adeptness. It is also known that people who speak two languages can learn a third language faster (and easier) than a person who speaks only one language.
Access to all kinds of media
People who speak more than a language have a wider range of media they can consume. Moreover, being constantly in touch with a language is one of the best ways to retain it, since fluency is something that can be lost.
Challenges faced
Most things in life have their ups and downs. This is the case of having a population who speaks more than one language. As much as bilingualism can bring economic benefits, this group faces difficulties that are hard to overcome.
Education Gap
It is significantly harder to develop a complete academic curriculum in two languages. This is especially true if the school tackles different subjects. A student that can read, speak, write and listen fluently in two different languages must get in touch with the languages in question in different scenarios. That is precisely why it is so hard to overcome the education gap. For instance, even having the second largest Spanish speaking population in the world, the United States also lacks qualified Spanish teachers and linguists. That is because most of the Spanish-speaking population in the country learned it at home. In Dallas, almost two thirds of the K-12 people who speak Spanish most likely were not directly exposed to Spanish in the classroom.
Intergeneration Transmission
The same research conducted by Texas Demographic Center found out that foreign-language use tends to phase out after three generations. In other words, this means that the proficiency of the population depends on the continued transmission of the language. Children that have both parents dominant in English, for example, have a higher risk of dropping the Spanish language.
On the contrary, people whose parents are bilingual or Spanish-dominant speakers have very high chances of speaking Spanish. 56% of bilingual parents raised their kids to speak both Spanish and English. While 34% of children with hispanic parents became bilingual. As we mentioned above, this happens because most people do not formally learn Spanish in the classroom. Instead, they acquire the language in their personal lives. This way, English becomes the language that is learned in other stances in their lives, such as at school or with friends.
Reaping the rewards of bilingualism in a society means that we all have to face the challenges and the role that it brings to the place. We can not capitalize from it if we do not know how to deal with bilingual people in our culture and embrace them. Remember: investing in bilingual education today means a more competent workforce tomorrow.
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:
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.
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 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 pairsand 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).
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
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?