Translation and localization play a crucial role in helping your business grow. Adjusting your brand assets for the local audience will help you establish trust and reach more customers. But when done poorly, translation will misinform and confuse customers. So how can you ensure a fluid website translation collaboration workflow that helps grow your business? Read further and learn how to collaborate effectively.
1 Establish company-wide commitment
Building a global presence requires a company-wide commitment. To grow globally, you have to take on translation strategically. There is more to customer experience than just buying a product. It means engaging with your marketing materials, learning about you, communicating with customer support, visiting your website, and more. If you want to create an outstanding customer experience, every department must chip in.
When working with LSPs, you will have to establish a smooth communication and operation workflow. Successful collaboration with an external partner is possible only when the entire team is on board. When it comes to machine translation, company-wide commitment serves an even bigger role. The key to successful translation is centralization. Centralization allows your business to grow alongside your localized materials.
To ensure this, you will need an in-depth localization and translation plan where everyone strives for the same goal. Following this strategy, you will efficiently adapt your offerings, content, and other assets with your brand globally.
2 Align your business objectives
Next, you must align your business objectives. In fierce global competition, successfully entering new markets can be overwhelming. Competing with many companies that are at customer disposal 24/7 requires a well-in-place strategy. Customers don't want to be only a number. They want personalized customer experiences tailored to their specific needs.
To put yourself on the path to achieving global success, ask yourself these questions:
- What are some important cultural aspects of the market you want to enter?
- What communication channels and languages does the local audience use?
- Are you willing to consider working with LSP, or will you use MT technology?
- How are you going to align your brand with a new audience?
Many companies partner with language service providers to translate all their assets. Curating a long-term partnership will require transparency and alignment. Make sure the LSP understands your business objectives precisely.
Using machine translation enables you to keep the whole strategy in-house. While you avoid dealing with external partners and rigid back-and-forth communication, this will take some time constraints on your team. Thus, you must align your business objectives with the localization strategy. A proper localization strategy will help you boost the whole process, save costs, and gain a competitive advantage in the global market faster.
3 Specify team roles
In the previous 2 chapters, we emphasized the importance of company-wide commitment to translation and localization. While this is true, it is crucial for everyone included in the process to get a designated role. People who understand their roles will work faster and more effectively.
To help avoid confusion, we suggest setting up a designated project manager for every translation project. The project manager will oversee the project whether you are translating in-house or with the help of a partner. Someone in charge of the project will also ensure consistency and accountability for catching the deadlines.
4 Create style guides
Style guides ensure brand consistency. Let's take Ikea as an example. Ikea is an enormous global company that operates in many different countries. Albeit serving a plethora of different audiences, everyone knows its branding. The same goes for Coca-Cola, Spotify, Nike, and many other world-famous companies. The biggest brands are prioritizing localization in their global strategy. Follow this link to learn more about the top 10 companies nailing localization strategy.
Style guides ensure your whole team is following the same standards. This can be in terms of writing, creating visuals, and formatting your creative assets. Consistency doesn't only make the workflow easier but also portrays your company as more professional.
If you work with an external partner, share the style guides with them. LSP will thus be able to understand how to format the translations of your content and convey the same voice as in the original language. Capturing the same intent and style as in the source language will enable your visitors to get the same experience in every market.
Pro tip: create a glossary of industry-specific terms that stays in the original language even after the translation. Having a glossary will help your translation partner better understand your translation needs.
5 Set realistic deadlines
If you work with an external partner, you must determine the timeframe of the translation process. By giving clear instructions, this process will be more or less straightforward. Professional translators know how much time they need to work on a particular project. If you use a machine translation like Linguana, there is a whole different story. MT will translate your website in a split second. All there is to do is to post-edit your freshly translated website.
Machine translation allows you to localize your own website without external help. MT enables you to translate multiple projects into more languages with only a few clicks. To guarantee high quality, your team will still have to post-edit all translated content. Just like you determine the project timeframe when working with external partners, you must do the same with your internal team. Keep in mind this is not the main task of your teammates, so this can take a bit longer than it would otherwise.
6 Keep the conversation going
Last but not least is the importance of communication. Establishing an ongoing communication flow between your team and a translation partner will improve the project's workflow. Communication will help you resolve problems and keep the project on track. Slack, for example, is a convenient and effortless solution to keep everyone involved in the loop. Another great way is to have a regular call via Zoom, Google Meets, or any other communication platform. As you can see, communication these days takes place online, meaning it doesn't take a toll on your time. Keeping everyone in the loop will improve and better align the work of your whole team.
Master the website translation collaboration
With good collaboration, website translation is a smooth and effective process. Following these six tips will allow you to translate your website efficiently. Let's quickly recap the collaboration tips that will improve your translation workflow:
- Establish company-wide commitment.
- Align your business objectives.
- Specify team roles
- Create style guides
- Set realistic deadline
- Establish a good communication process.
Following these tips, working with an external team will be a breeze. But what if you want to use a machine translation instead? Linguana enables you to translate a website in an instance, following all the best practices mentioned in this article. Sign up for a lifetime deal and never worry about translating your website again.