Digital Marketing Content: How to Ensure Quality Translations

High-Quality Translations Are Key to Your Digital Marketing Content Succeeding in Foreign Markets

The online space is ever changing and these days SEO, social media, and content marketing are some of the most valuable digital marketing content you create. Most startups focus the majority of their marketing efforts in the digital space, but how can you ensure that when you’re expanding into foreign markets all your digital content gets translated at the quality you need?

Establishing Content Profiles

Different content may need different levels of translations. Internal memos won’t need the same high quality as any customer-facing content you create.

Establishing expectations for the various digital marketing content you produce gives you a benchmark to measure against and a standard your employees or agency know they have to hit. Include things like your contents KPIs, objectives, and engagement metrics.

This can sometimes be difficult as the top-of-the-funnel content doesn’t aim to convert customers, but rather push them further into your funnel. However, you can measure things like time spent on page and social shares.

You can learn more with this handy infographic that explains what content marketing metrics you should be measuring.

In addition, you may want to include a style sheet that covers things like tone of voice, grammar and spelling, your brand guidelines, and a glossary of technical terms within your industry.

Ensure All Stakeholders Know the Language Used in Your Digital Marketing Content

The stakeholders in your startup’s translation project can vary from your marketing team to IT and in-country staff. This can result in a lot of people with different technical and professional backgrounds collaborating. It’s therefore important that everyone is on the same page if you want high-quality translations for your digital marketing content.

Your translation agency will likely raise multiple questions throughout the project as they may notice text that has errors or that could be interpreted in the wrong way by the audience in the country you are targeting.

Picking up these small issues has the ability to dramatically increase the quality of your content translations. Therefore, it is important that all stakeholders within your startup have a systematic way to validate any queries so that the output of translations remains consistent.

For this reason, every stakeholder of your digital marketing content should fully understand your industry’s technical language. This will speed up workflows as everyone can collaborate and give effective answers that, in turn, will result in high-quality translations that your foreign audiences will want to engage with.

Learn More: Using Translation to Connect With and Engage Multilingual Audiences

Set Up a Thought-Out Management Process

Take full advantage of all that your agency can offer in translating your digital marketing content by having a structured and thought-out process in place.

Having a collaborative online drive that all stakeholders have access to, giving them the ability to delegate tasks in real time, can speed up the workflow and ensure everyone is aware of their roles within the project. This stops things like duplicate work or projects sitting around waiting for queries to be answered or work to be assigned.

According to Marketing Profs, 30 percent of the marketers considered the slow turnaround times to be one of the biggest challenges in translation and localization. By creating an effective management process for your translation projects, deadlines have a much greater chance of being met and work will not come to a standstill while waiting for responses.

Use Translation Memory

Marketing Profs found that 81 percent of marketers had never even heard of translation memory—well, they are missing a trick. Taking advantage of translation memory can help speed up and reduce costs in translation projects while maintaining the high-quality content your startup needs.

Translation is most definitely a job for humans as automated translations can end in terrible miscommunications that can hurt your startup’s reputation. With that being said, there are support technologies out there that can be utilized to help speed up the process.

There is incredibly smart software available that can help translators deliver relevant translations that stay on brand message while also helping reduce the costs.

Translation memory recycles all of your digital marketing content that has already been translated. It stores all these segments (sentences, paragraphs, or sentence-like units) in a database in order to assist your human translators.

As this “memory” is collaborative, it can be used by several members of a translations agency at once and you can put any previously translated content into the database as well. This means you can have more people working on a project at once without seeing any drop in consistency or quality.

The segments that are stored in the memory have already been translated and this saves the translators time. On top of that, it also saves you money, as you don’t have to pay for the same phrase or sentence to be repeatedly translated.