Meet Joe. Joe manages localization for the DMV, and his translation just made the new driver’s manual. For some, making national or even international headlines is a dream come true, but probably not as a bad translation meme, right? Here are some tips on how to deliver quality content translation and avoid being like poor Joe.

Tip #1: Quality to Match the Content

Not all content is alike, so to maximize your localization spend, you want to be sure to pay for high quality translation for highly visible, long-lasting content, so ask yourself:

Does an incorrect translation put someone’s life in danger?

Would our brand be severely damaged by an incorrect or misleading translation?

Is this a short-term or long-lived piece of content?

Is this being distributed as hard copy or digital?

How easy is it to fix the content when a mistake is found?

Your answers to these questions will determine the quality level you need and help you avoid Joe’s fate.

Tip #2: Understand Quality Metrics

Language Quality Evaluation (LQE) is a way to objectively view your content quality, based on the criteria that matter to you – using human reviewers. It is an investment, so it’s best applied to the right content (see Tip #1), but it can help you understand the level of quality you currently have and whether it is trending over time in the right direction. It can also help you make decisions about your vendors and any trade-offs you may be making for speed or cost considerations. For an in-depth view of how translation quality is defined, check out this research.

Lingotek has spent the better part of the last four years creating the best integrated LQE feature-set in any TMS. Learn more.

Tip #3: Context, Context, Context!

That would have never happened to Joe if the people translating that content knew it was a road sign for a driver’s manual. Context changes everything, and Lingotek is the world’s leader in providing context!

See our Blog Post on the importance of Context.

Tip #4: Don’t Repeat, Repeat, Repeat!

Once you have invested in translating your content, you don’t want another translator to come along and translate it again in the next revision.

A real-time, cloud-based Translation Memory (TM) means that the translations you already have and have approved will be reused – maximizing your quality, but also your spend and time-to-market – TM for the hat-trick!

You can’t underestimate the power of quality translations, and the work involved to ensure a high standard can be overwhelming. Click on the link below to learn more about how Lingotek can help you easily achieve the kind of quality that leads to business growth and customer satisfaction.

With the thousands of translation and language service providers, it’s critical that you find the right partner to help you reach your business goals. Here are some considerations to keep in mind to find the right translation partner to grow your business.

Know Your Business Needs

1. What is your industry?

The first step to finding the right translation services partner is understanding your own unique needs so you can communicate them and find a partner with those capabilities. There are several factors that may require custom capabilities. When searching for a prospective translation partner, here are some special requirements to keep in mind.

2. Do you have any uncommon language pairs?

Some language pairs are more common than others. For example, common language pairs often involve English. However, some language pairs that don’t involve English may be less common and may add another layer of complexity.

If you have an uncommon language pair, a special team may need to be brought in. For example, if translating from German to French it’s likely that your content will need to be translated from German to English and then from English to French. It’s important to know if your language partner has that capability.

3. What is your workflow and pace?

Different industries and organizations require different pace, teams, and workflows. When choosing a partner, find one who can meet product deadlines, is flexible enough to work with your existing workflows and vendors, and can meet your budget expectations.

Is this a one-time translation project or something that will need to grow? As your company expands, you may need increased content or dynamic content on your website to be changed frequently. Depending on your budget or timeline, you may also want to stagger translation focusing a larger portion of your budget on marketing or supporting a product launch with more specialized human translation. This can grow over time to include technical support and user forums.

Questions to Ask a Translation Service Partner

1. Who are your content creators?

Who is creating your content is often overlooked, but the “who” is critical to the quality of your content. Content writers should be regional, in-country experts and understand locale-based language nuances as well as your company’s technical and stylistic needs.

Lingotek’s linguistic experts have top certifications (ATA, ITI, CATTI, LISA, etc.), go through security protocols, and provide samples to make sure that your brand can be reflected appropriately. The quality of your content will make a difference in your brand’s digital visibility and the overall user experience.

2. What technology do you use? What are its capabilities?

Your translation partner will be collaborating with your team members and within their own teams (content creators, engineers, designers, marketers, etc.). Integrated tools and connectors that make collaboration seamless are vital to this process.

Lingotek’s technology connects to the most popular software for designers, marketers, and project managers to allow them to focus on producing quality content and spend less time on duplications and unnecessary conversions.

3. Do you have a method to check the quality of translations?

Quality evaluation tools are critical to efficiency. Lingotek leverages translation memory with its Linguistic Quality Evaluations (LQE), a premium evaluation software that allows managers to provide analyses of current processes and workflows with proactive recommendations and improvements.

Coupled with our Translation Management System (TMS), we are able to provide real-time transparency and performance metrics for your company and build agile workflows to help the measurement of your KPIs.

4. Can your processes align with our processes?

There are thousands of language service providers on the market. But the main difference between a provider and a partner is the ability to create custom content and strategy aligned to your company’s goals.

This may mean creating a customized strategy from Point A to Point B; but sometimes getting your product to market also means working with existing vendors and workflows. Knowing if your vendor can be flexible from the start is critical. At Lingotek, we listen to your needs first and align to meet those needs with custom strategies that meet your needs, timeline, and budget.

A True Partner Adds Value

It’s easy to find a translation services provider — there are thousands of them! But a true partner looks out for your best interest and works alongside you to understand your business, build trust, and tailor solutions to give you a competitive advantage. A partner is aligned with your strategic objectives and goals to create custom solutions in order to enter new markets quickly and effectively.

At Lingotek, we aren’t just looking for the next transactional exchange; we are here to help you create quality content that adds value with premium technology and expert strategy. If you’re ready for a true language services partner, contact one of our experts at Lingotek to create your translation strategy.

Marketers often find themselves at the forefront of a company’s global expansion and responsible for creating a strategy to reach customers in target countries. While an exciting opportunity, going multinational is also a huge challenge for those tasked with overseeing the development of new marketing strategies.

Entering new markets requires rewriting the playbook that brought domestic success. While brand consistency is important, different markets favor different approaches, and the pieces of effective translation and digital optimization are no exception — this can be a daunting task.

However, the right combination of tools and automations for your strategy can ease that burden. While investing in shiny, new tools alone may deepen the trough of disillusionment, combining the right tools and experts with your strategy will help your team hit target audiences effectively on time and within budget.

Leveraging Automation: Translation Automation to Fit Your Strategy

Similar to how your organization-wide strategy sets the vision and defines strategic objectives, market-entry should include translation automation that does the same. Start by identifying your overarching goals for leveraging automation, the strategic areas that you feel could most benefit, and the budget that you have available.

If entering a new market, you likely have a lot of content to translate and a limited budget and timeline within which to do so. While human-translated content can be key to expanding into a new market, sometimes it isn’t practical financially or logistically to have all of content localized by human translation. It’s critical to understand the different types of content you have, their different weights of importance, and then prioritize them accordingly.

With a prioritization strategy and a staggered translation process, your brand expansion can reach your desired market successfully. A staggered translation process includes using automation where possible for certain types of content, and saving more costly expert translation for more complex or nuanced types of content. There are also specific types of content that necessitate discussing with a translation strategy expert as cost and time savings may differentiate depending on industry.

There is some content that can be effectively machine-translated to save time and money. User-generated content such as user forums and user reviews can be efficiently translated with machine learning as well as frontlines of communications like SMS or emails. Other resources that translate well via machine are FAQs, knowledge bases, and alerts and notifications. By using your style guide, term glossary, and machine learning these are excellent places to utilize automations.

Conversely, there is some content that necessitates more localization involving expert (human) translators. Some examples of content more appropriate for the nuances of human translation include advertising, legal, and marketing content. Other content such as websites, software application interfaces, documents and manuals, and user guides may be able to include some cost savings by integrating different levels of machine translation.

By differentiating, prioritizing, and staggering content, your business can focus on high-quality translations in the areas that matter and:

Agile Translation Solutions to Drive Your Revenue

An agile company should be able to connect to popular enterprise applications so that you can work directly in your native environments. For example, by connecting to the highest-rated applications on the market such as Adobe, Drupal, and WordPress, Lingotek gives your project managers the ability to work with translated content in real-time and on the tools with which they are familiar. Expert translators, project managers, designers, and marketing leaders can translate, localize, update, and publish global content within a single, uninterrupted workflow resulting in quicker time to market.

To create a seamless work environment and meet your goals, your translation partner should be able to work with your vendors with ease. It’s critical that your translation company is able to fill in the gaps that you need by either working with your vendors or having the capability to handle every aspect of your needs. As companies scale up, there is value in having partners who have the flexibility to fill in the needs of your supply chain in order to minimize disruption and create process efficiencies.

Trusted Experts to Meet Your Goals

With over 20 years of optimizing automation systems, one of Lingotek’s relationship leaders, Richard Roberts, provides the following tips: “Begin your venture with the end goal in mind. This isn’t a one-size-fits-all model. What are your company’s unique goals and values? While some organizations are focused solely on cost savings, others may prioritize increasing accuracy, enhancing the customer experience, or reducing vendor utilization.”

In order to define your market entrance strategy and the appropriate partners, consider the following questions:

What are the problems your organization needs to solve?

What resources do you currently have to solve those problems?

What is your prioritized content?

Where does automation make sense?

As businesses continue to globalize, companies can gain a competitive advantage by focusing their marketing efforts on content that targets the right international markets, adapting their products and strategies to appeal to local customers, and resourcefully using the right tools and automations in the right time and place.

Reach out to Lingotek to work with our expert advisors to find the custom strategy to meet your company’s goals. We’re ready to help provide you with a competitive advantage in the global marketplace.

Businesses must meet the speed at which culture shifts. Doing so in a global market requires time-sensitive, rapid response partners who understand the nuances of sociopolitical shifts. Premium localization is no longer just a competitive advantage — it has become a customer expectation.

Language localization directly affects a company’s bottom line. Appia found that especially in mobile marketing content (the device through which the majority of Internet content is consumed), localization drove increased click-through rates by 86% in global markets. 

The numbers don’t lie; effective localization is key to seeing ROI. Effective localization decreases customer acquisition costs, secures customer retention goals, and increases transparency for businesses to make informed decisions in new or expanding markets.

However, not all localization services are the same. Local, industry-expert translators who match the style and speed of your company are key to automation augmentation. Creating the right mix will make the difference between success and failure when entering a new market.

The Importance of Regional Translators

Marketers know that translation is key to globalized audiences. However, not all translations are equally effective. In order to create optimized content for your budget and time constraints, localization can be the key to the acquisition and retention of customers. The internet allows for cultural norms to shift quickly and for a shift in the public mindset of your brand to change equally as fast. This is true in cultural norms, holidays, slang, and political or social events.

Because of the rapid rate of change and the speed at which information is distributed, it’s imperative to have in-country translators who understand and can respond to the cultural and political landscape of your target locale in real-time. Doing so will make the difference between building brand equity or sounding tone-deaf or missing your potential customers entirely. Expert in-country translators create content that increases customer acquisition as well as creates brand trust and loyalty investing in long-term relationships with your audiences.

In addition to relationship building, locally sensitive content and translators provide your company’s key decision-makers with intelligence insights that allow informed decisions. Translators should constantly be gathering intelligence data. Having translators in-country means that they are sensitive to the market and shifting needs and can provide this guiding information to your decision-makers quickly in times of crisis or social change.

Risks of Not Investing in Localization

Conversely, a failure to invest in optimized localization and local translation experts could be disastrous for your brand’s market entry or expansion. Potential risks could include misuse of allocated resources resulting in your brand becoming digitally invisible to local markets. Failing SEO optimization or low-performing content could lead to a loss in potential customers or the movement of current customers to more localized providers.

Failure to capitalize on localization is also a missed opportunity to gain intelligent insights. If high-quality translations function as a feedback loop, they will serve as a gateway to regional trends and conversations for your brand. Without localization, your brand’s dialogue is put into a silo of a one-way conversation, which can result in missing out on important market data.

Find the Right Solution for Your Needs

The best solution is the one that is customized to your business needs. One disastrous mistake that a company can make when going global is overspending on the wrong things, and not allocating enough for the right solutions.

For example, when choosing a translation solution, a company may charge a high price to have all your content translated by human translators. Consumers don’t have the patience for latent technology and your brand could miss out on opportunities.

Instead, your translation experts should understand different weights of content and where time and resources can be saved using machine translation, allowing the experts to focus on optimizing content that is better suited for human translation. For example, user-generated content can be easily and effectively translated with MT, while it is better for marketing content to be expertly optimized.

Another common mistake is not understanding the humans behind the localization effort. Spanish in Latin America is not used the same as Spanish in Spain and your consumers will immediately know the difference. Invest in vendors who represent your target demographic, understand your industry, and can match your brand’s voice.

If your business is expanding, there couldn’t be a more critical time to find the right technology in order to manage your brand’s speed, quality, and overall image. To find custom solutions to fit your schedule and budget, contact Lingotek’s strategic translation experts.

Now more than ever, people crave the familiar. Consumer markets have been on the trajectory of rejecting standardization and being drawn to customization. The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the need for localization even further.

Large-scale enterprises know that optimizing content on a global scale is critical to scalability. For mid-sized corporations who are on the cusp of going global, creating effective content across regional and language barriers can be pivotal. Understanding the differences between localization and translation is a key to scaling efficiently.

Current research confirms that the language(s) we speak affect our decision-making processes. The nuances between translation versus localization may be subtle but substantial — what we’re trying to achieve through both is truly communicating an intended idea.

How does this difference translate to your company in terms of global reach? It means that different buyer markets will relate to content differently, and adoption may be dependent on getting the localization of digital content correct.

How Is Localization Different from Translation?

While similar in concept, the actual translation of language is only a piece of content localization. It’s understandable how teams might miss the subtleties of communication, ending up with sub-par content that doesn’t capture the attention of their global audience.

Translation is word for word changes.

Often done by machine translation (MT), this part of the process doesn’t take into account all the other elements of communicating digital experiences. MT will only translate the words on a page based on a default locale; it will only reflect the style of the source text, no matter what context. For example, when translating into English, will the content be translated into British, American, or Australian English? This could have a significant impact on the user. 

Localization transcreates digital experiences that feel customized and natural to users, leading to drastically improved SEO outcomes.

By transcreating content, technical details such as currency, calendar date formatting, cultural norms, and expectations make your content relevant to international audiences. By doing so, intent, style, tone, and context are not lost and content can feel more organic to consumer markets across the globe. Additionally, localized content will be much more visible to users as SEO rankings are increased across local search engines.

Locale: Language + Location

According to PwC’s 2019 Global Consumer Insights Survey, user experience and interactivity with products and brands are becoming increasingly important to consumers.

If interactivity is based on digital content, it’s increasingly important that content feels personalized for the user. While machine-translated automation and natural language processing have their place, they should augment customized, locale-specific content that also utilizes expert translation. Regional content is not only more effective, but is also more difficult to replicate, providing a considerable competitive advantage. 

French in France is different in Canada and even more different in South Louisiana Cajun French cultures, and English in America is not the same as English in Britain or Australia. A British English translation may be completely confusing to an American English speaker.

Take this British English sentence: “I don’t like the colours of this jumper. I shall take the lift to the flat and change.” For an American speaker, there are multiple issues here. These issues are exaggerated even further in digital content.

The spelling of colour, rather than color, and the use of jumper and lift immediately identify this sentence as British English, as sweater and elevator are used in American English. An unfamiliar American may be able to navigate this in context, but digitally it would be difficult. A localized transcreation, more appealing to global audiences, would be: “I don’t like the color of this sweater. I’ll take the elevator to the apartment to change.”

While these content changes are subtle, they could mean the difference between keeping and losing customers. According to SWEO, it takes the majority of users .05 seconds to form an opinion about your website. That means that any difficulty in understanding word choice could immediately deter potential customers.

That’s why in addition to machine translation (MT), your translation tools should also have an advanced translation management system (TMS) that also incorporates expert translation.

Localization Improves User Experience and SEO

One of the most prominent effects good translation can have is maintaining functionality by adapting to different sociolinguistic expectations of global users. For example, when entering the Chinese market, the red and white design of Coca-Cola was changed to “ke kou ke le,” which translates to “delicious happiness.”

Coca-Cola’s transcreation efforts did not end with the words themselves, but also shifted for the Chinese market in other aspects of communication. These marketing devices included colors and other visual elements such as design and layout. For example, they shifted their logo to be white on red, red being the predominant color, since red correlates to prosperity in Chinese culture. Various marketing choices vary from Beijing to Barcelona to meet the public’s expectations.

Similarly, the regional content localization process is multi-layered and complex. While automated translation plays an important role, marketing content must be rewritten for local consumer markets to be visible and streamlined for top user experience. Poor usability not only deters potential customers, but also adversely affects SEO, making content digitally invisible. In order to break cultural barriers and improve the usability of your website, your transcreation efforts should also focus upon visual storytelling elements to add to clarity.

Visual elements include:

• • Colors – Different colors have different cultural references in each market. In some countries, red denotes danger while in others it communicates prosperity. 
  • Layout – Some languages need more space than others to express the same concepts or perhaps numerical systems have different layouts. Choose software that is able to examine how language changes impact layout in real time. 
  • Photos – Visually, metadata should track similar photos keeping you from making serious cultural faux pas.
  • Units of Measurement – Most countries use the metric system. Units of measurement should be converted to make content easy to follow and understand.
  • Date Formats – Does 3/4/12 mean March 4 (as in the US) or April 3 (as in the UK)?  The differences in date formats should reflect local standards.
  • Currencies – Price is critical information when making buying decisions. If conversions are not provided, customers could be lost to a local competitor.

Localization Makes a World of Difference

There is a delicate balance between localization and automation. Communicating clearly while optimizing efficiency is key. Can the two be reconciled? Yes. The transcreation tools your company uses should combine the power of automated machine translation and learning, centralized project monitoring, and continuous updates with the custom, creative expertise to meet local expectations.

Technology-enabled language solutions should easily integrate with CRM, CMS, eCommerce platforms, knowledge bases, product and support documentation, and be accessible and transparent through a client portal and Linguistic Quality Evaluation (LQE) tools. The combination will keep efficient and transparent centralized processes in place for your strategy team, while also creating positive CX and improved SEO in your new market.

By combining efficiencies with expertise, you’ll be able to make the most of your translation investment and improve your chances of increasing sales and growing your business around the world. Contact Lingotek for an agile, intelligent translation management strategy to deliver effective content to the diverse communities that you serve.