Countdown to Going Global #5: Craft a working translation/localization strategy

Tip #5 in our countdown is about translation and localization strategy:

What will you translate and how?
Into which languages?
Who’s in charge?

If this is your first time tackling a translation project, welcome! Translation is one of the best things that you can do for your international company. Done well, translation can improve your user experience and boost your revenue, traffic and conversion rates, often significantly, as has been the case with many of our customers. We’ve broken down this tip into four quick segments to help you create a solid foundation for translating your content.

Know what you’re looking for

When you first begin researching how to translate your content, you’re going to encounter a bunch of industry terms that have similar meanings. The five big processes are:

Translation, process of expressing text in another language
Localization, translation, but tailored for a certain country/market
Transcreation, foreign language copywriting, like translation
Globalization, broad, strategic process of entering new markets
Internationalization, process of readying systems for localization

Before choosing a translation service, get to know these terms better here.

Know what you need to translate

Different types of content require different kinds of translation and different services. You may want to use machine translation to get the gist of some foreign language text, but you would never want to use it when coming up with new taglines for your company. Do a quick inventory of your content, grouping it thematically. An example list for a tech company might look like this:

Static content
Seldom updated but may need light maintenance

Brand name and messaging
Core website and product
Transactional messages
Terms of service and legal information

Dynamic content
Frequently updated, often high-volume

User-generated content (user reviews, comments, social)
Marketing content (email, content marketing, white papers, ads, public relations materials, landing pages, etc.)
Business communications (email, documents)
Product listings (ecommerce)
Support messages and documentation

With this list, you can determine how you’d like to approach translation for each group of content—which type of translation will you use? How much will you invest in it? How will you maintain each type of content?

As a general rule, while all of your content should read clearly in a foreign language, it’s usually your static content that requires special attention. Because your brand name and tagline is very high impact, it’s a good idea to invest more time and money in a translation service or consultant who is very familiar with doing this kind of work. Your website and product will need heavier rounds of review and communication with translators (to get word lengths and meanings just right in context), and legal information should always be handled by a translator who is qualified to work with this kind of text. This phase of your translation/localization effort will require the most care.

On the other hand, dynamic content changes frequently, sometimes even by the hour. In the case of marketing content, landing pages and digital ads can have a very short lifespan, as you A/B test different messages and designs. If you’re with an ecommerce company that translates thousands of product listings each day, you’ll want to set up translation for this content that’s fast and inexpensive, and the same goes for user-generated content like reviews.

Explore these different types of content in-depth in our guides to going global for ecommerce and travel. Even if you’re not in these industries, both guides contain rich information that’s applicable to any translation project or industry.

Know which languages to tackle

If you’re a French company that’d like to sell in China and Brazil, you just need to translate from French into Chinese and Portuguese, right? When going global for the first time, it’s easy to make these small missteps with language selection, especially if you have multiple people on your team translating content.

When you research your target market, it’s important that you also get to know which languages and dialects are best for you and to stick with that decision. Just as British and American English have important differences, so do many other languages, like Spanish, Portuguese, German and more. As an example, if you’re a German company targeting American shoppers, translating your website into British English while using American English for all of your product descriptions looks strange and gives a bad customer experience.

Know who’s in charge

Just as we encouraged you to establish clear leadership for your overall globalization effort, you should do the same with translation and localization. While large companies usually create a separate team dedicated to localization, we’ve found that in small companies the person responsible for coordinating translation/localization is often already in a role and on a team that handles content, like:

Engineering
Marketing
Creative/Production

Inevitably, you’ll need multiple people working on applying this translated content to your products, materials and website (like design and engineering), but it’s a good idea to have one person in charge of the following:

Creating timelines with input from other departments
Handling relationships with translation services and translators
Organizing and maintaining the translated content itself

Multiple teams will naturally evolve to handle their own translation needs. For example, your Support team shouldn’t need to filter their messages through a Localization Manager on the Marketing team or Engineering team. To start, however, we recommend putting one person in control of this area—it’s easy for translation quality or efficiency to take a hit if there are too many cooks in the kitchen. While your Support Manager will handle his or her own team’s operations, someone will still need to set up a translation integration with your support system, after all.

There are many more aspects of translation/localization that we haven’t touched on here, but we’ll address more in future tips. Stay tuned!

Read all of the tips in Gengo’s Going Global Countdown:

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