This is One of the Fastest Growing Language in the World
According to Duolingo Language Report, an annual report on language learning in the world, Korean was the second fastest growing language worldwide and ranks seventh in the most studied languages on the planet.
Rodrigo Demetrio
2 min
Worlds interest in Asian languages
Although English has always been the most-studied language around the world, there has been a marked increase in the study of Asian languages, an indicator that the cultural influence of Asia on the rest of the world is rising!According to Duolingo Language Report, an annual report on language learning in the world, Korean was the second fastest growing language worldwide and ranks seventh in the most studied languages on the planet. Also, according to the report, the main motivations of Korean learners around the world are culture and travel, and are directly related to the influence of Korean culture, especially K-Pop.
Hallyu: The Korean Wave
The South Korean entertainment industry has emerged as a large exporter of media products. Whether producing movies, soap operas, games or music, South Korea has managed to expand its culture to many western countries.Last year, the South Korean movie Parasite was named best picture at The Oscars, achieving what no other subtitled film has done in the 92-year history of the Academy Awards, becoming the first non-English language movie to take the top prize.Producer Kwak Sin-ae, who collected the trophy, said: "I'm speechless. We never imagined this to happen. I feel like a very opportune moment in history is happening right now."The high quality of Korean films aroused the world's curiosity about the language and culture of the country, and K-Pop was an impressive success.[caption id="attachment_7262" align="alignnone" width="532"]
Producer Kwak Sin-ae[/caption]
Pop Culture
Since the democratization of the country in the 1980s, the relaxation of censorship, the reduction of travel restrictions, and the drive to diversify the economy have contributed to the global spread of Korean culture.The roots of Korean participation in modern pop culture can be traced back decades, but the hallyu, or Korean wave, only started after the Asian financial crisis in the late 1990s. In music, South Korean pop groups flourished internally during the early 1990s.The government wanted to spread its culture around the world - and it started in an unlikely place. South Korea's first big global hits were TV shows known as K-dramas, initially aimed at domestic audiences but finding popularity in other parts of Asia and elsewhere.[caption id="attachment_7267" align="alignnone" width="800"]
The giant size statue, gold bronze colour and erected outside the COEX shopping centre, is dedicated to the South Korean viral dance pop music hit by Psy.[/caption]The international success of K-dramas spurred careful planning for the globalization of K-pop beyond groups that had achieved national fame. As with the electronics and automobile industries, the centralization of economic power within large conglomerates allowed for efficient production under careful discipline. In the K-pop star system, this meant recruiting pop musicians and managing them through years of training and thoughtful presentation - which paid off with wildly successful pop acts like the boy band EXO, which made its television debut in 2011. EXO was conceived as a South Korean-Chinese group, performing in both languages and promoting their songs in both countries.Everyone in the world, like it or not, must have seen a K-pop related video at least once. In 2012, the world had viral hits. PSY – Gangnam Style was at one time the most viewed video on the planet, thanks to its addictive, hilarious, dance and beat. It reached number two on the Billboard Hot 100.
K-pop Diplomacy
Hometowns of K-Pop have idols named neighborhoods after them. The federal government has created tourist routes based on the filming locations of K-Pop clips in a campaign called “Imagine Your Korea” that plays on fans' emotional attachment: “Recreate the scenes yourself, or simply enjoy the fact that your favorite member has already been standing in this exact spot, breathing the same air and seeing the same view”, says the website.The results are palpable: tourism to South Korea has tripled. Worldwide, 90 million people are affiliated with fan clubs related to Hallyu, and the number of foreign students in Korean universities has increased by 20%. Interest in the language has never been greater, and the government has opened 130 institutes to teach Korean in 50 countries.
BTS
K-Pop would have lost its biggest market had it not been for three letters: BTS. The crisis with China coincided with the explosion of the idol group in the West. Between 2018 and 2019, BTS released three Billboard #1 album in less than 12 months. The same feat had only ever been achieved by the Beatles (and of course they didn't sing in Korean). K-Pop artists began to pack stadiums around the world, from the US to Saudi Arabia. Korea gained unprecedented visibility as the Korean soft-power agenda was drawn up.Born from an agency outside the Big 3, since 2013 they have ensured their place in the sun among thousands and thousands of idols, gaining fans and recognition in Korea and achieving international notoriety. Today, they collaborate with artists such as Halsey and Nicki Minaj, as well as performances at awards such as The Video Music Awards and The Grammys. Their reach is so great that they have managed to win over a legion of devoted fans who provide many record-breakers, not only as a Korean boy band, but also as artists in general.And so, in just over 20 years, South Korea has surfed the pop wave that took it to conquer the seven seas and beyond.'Life Goes On', the last song on BTS' 'BE' album, reached #1 on the Billboard Global Chart and remained at that position for 7 weeks. BTS' single 'Dynamite', an all-English song that was the group's first, peaked at number one on the Billboard Global Chart and remained on the chart for 18 weeks. That song alone generated an impressive figure of $1.43 billion.
A.R.M.Y
“ARMY” stands for "Adorable Representative M.C. for Youth" and it carries quite some meaning behind it, given that "Army" is associated with the military, body armor, and how those two things are always together, the fandom name basically means that fans will always be together with BTS. Following the BTS style of clothes and hair, the Korean wave is a trend not only in lifestyle but in educational life too, as people started studying about Korean culture and language. For helping the fandom to understand the messages in the songs, some phrases are placed in English, mainly in the chorus, making their audience more interested in discovering the rest of the song. In Brazil and Indonesia, for example, the demand for courses to learn Korean has increased among young people, and some schools have started to offer the language as an extracurricular subject. This further proves the proportion that the Korean wave took to place itself as part of the culture of these and many other countries.
Learn Korean with BTS
After garnering the hottest awards in western pop music and establishing its position on charts and radio, the impact of K-pop has already broken through language barriers as well. Inspired by the sound, thousands of fans are dedicating themselves to learning the Korean language.“Learn Korean with BTS” is an ongoing video series created by BTS that makes it easy and fun for global fans to learn Korean. The series is a way to help BTS fans from around the world to enjoy BTS’ music on an even deeper level.
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?