Matt Grech
Content Marketing ManagerSmartling
As a writer, I often find myself juggling multiple projects - everything from blog posts, to white papers, to editing content pieces. For perspective, our marketing team has gone from producing 4 articles per month to 10 articles per month, a 166% increase!
By centralizing all of my work into a single source of truth, a single platform to track all of my projects, I have managed to establish an efficient and organized content engine.
With such a diverse array of content, it is important to keep track of everything to ensure a balance of quality and consistency.
The same can be said for any form of content strategy -- particularly a localization strategy.
Localization involves multiple projects, multiple channels, and sometimes multiple processes across different departments, yet they are all working towards the same goal: to offer a compelling brand experience to new audiences in their native languages.
Brands that are looking to localize their experiences and content benefit greatly from a unified strategy that enables centralized management of all projects across content types and devices - a single source of truth for all translations and users.
Why Centralize Your Localization Process?
The goal of localization is to enable customers, anywhere, to interact with your brand through an experience familiar to them across the entirety of their journey - from cart to casa!
All of your content will need to be translated and localized in a structured, organized way to ensure a consistent brand voice and experience across all languages.
One centralized source of truth for all your translation projects enables greater cohesion between departments, projects and even company goals.
Here’s how Smartling helps:
Simplify Project Management
Smartling connects with whatever solution your brand is using to host and serve content to users.
This means that all of your content flows into one single platform and is always accessible within a single place.
Juggling emails and spreadsheets, copying and pasting strings, and managing freelance translators just isn't sustainable for the modern business.
Improve Consistency Across Content
Linguistic assets are crucial elements that assist translators in their day-to-day work.
Style guides and glossaries, for example, provide translators with key directions on brand guidelines including voice and tone, while a glossary provides translators with a list of on-brand terminology.
When available in one centralized database, all of these linguistic assets can be accessed by translators working on any piece. This means more consistent content and even greater cost savings.
Cross-Departmental Reporting
Real-time analytics provide your teams with a shared framework for measuring, communicating and improving translation performance.
With one centralized platform for all of your translation projects, these metrics can be compiled from across the company to gain a complete and total view of your entire translation process.
Understand where bottlenecks occur and how to improve across your entire database of content.
Better Manage Resources and Budgeting
One unified source of truth enables brands to better track costs and estimate new initiatives with on-demand reports.
This can help brands determine exactly how much money was saved with translation memory or accurately estimate the cost of a new translation project.
Again, with one centralized platform, brands can manage their resources across all of their translation projects and workflows.
How to Centralize Your Localization Process With a Unified Strategy
Here is how your brand can work to implement a unified strategy for localization throughout your organization.
1. Advocate Internally
Localization should be recognized throughout your organization as a new revenue stream, as opposed to just another cost.
Provide a business case for a unified strategy to your C-level executives highlighting the benefit of localization and providing proven examples of the ROI of translation,
2. Select The Right Solution
Set your team up for success from the beginning with the right solution. Smartling’s technology and translation services can unify all translation needs under one roof.
Our TMS can adapt to your specific use case, and our Language Services will provide your organization with a one-stop shop.
Smartling also includes industry-leading functionality like Visual Context and powerful job automation, including Dynamic Workflows.
3. Make localization part of your content strategy
To provide a consistent and compelling experience across all languages, ensure that your source content is of the highest quality from the beginning.
Translation quality will suffer because of low quality source content, draining additional resources and slowing down your overall strategy.
4. Leverage Data to Continue to Optimize
As mentioned above, unifying your strategy into one single source of truth provides your organization with one single source of data.
Utilize this data to determine where your workflows can be improved, and how to properly allocate resources to continue to optimize the localization process across all departments.
Scale Your Business With a Unified Strategy
Working with just one centralized localization team that is responsible for your brand's localization process and strategy can enable your brand to scale and grow in new regions faster than previously possible.
Now, you may be thinking it's time for your brand to centralize your localization efforts with a unified strategy. Well, chat with one of our experts today to learn how you Smartling can help you do just that!
