Top Website Localization Best Practices to Streamline Your Localization Process
As you prepare to launch your startup in a new market, it’s clear that you need a website localization strategy. How will the work be completed? How will your team communicate? How can you track progress? The following website localization best practices will guide you in answering these questions.
1. Use Different Protocols for Different Types of Content
You will likely run into issues if you use the same protocol to translate blogs for your sixth-largest foreign market as you do to translate the terms and conditions for your largest market. You are either giving your blog posts too much attention, or your legalese is getting neglected.
You do not want to waste time on low-value tasks, nor do you want to invite errors that lead to long correction cycles. However, you will have no choice but to settle for one of the above outcomes if your translation management system (TMS) only allows for rigid, cookie-cutter workflows.
Businesses do not have to choose between efficiency and quality when they give localization process managers the ability to cater the sequence and length of workflows to the text type.
Fortunately, we are able to adjust our workflow to fit the needs of our customers. We can strategically add or remove internal reviewers, in-country consultants, and subject matter experts to the workflows as needed.
2. Give Reviewers the Complete Context of the Content
For your translation to be successful, professionals must understand intended meaning, page layout, acceptable tone, and other contextual factors.
You drastically increase the risk of ceaseless editing cycles, delayed deliveries, and misinterpreted strings when reviewers do not have these vital nuances. Capturing the relevant context from a spreadsheet is exhausting in practice and nearly impossible in theory.
Linguistic professionals need a more technical solution that provides a complete visual perspective of the copy that needs to be translated. For years, CMSs have relied on in-context review to ensure quality.
We use a state-of-the-art platform that allows our team to see the text they are translating in context. This instantly removes various ambiguities that cause errant translations by letting translators see the source material within the full context of its associated app, document, or site.
For more on why context matters, check out this 2014 article from Smashing Magazine.
3. Utilize a Cloud-Based TMS
What if your development team was trying to complete a project without a program like Asana or Jira? How successful would your marketing team be without Trello or Basecamp? You would be stuck with endless chats, spreadsheets, and emails. There would be no way to see how your projects are coming along.
The only way for teams to maintain their speed is to bring everyone together in a single space. In this age of mobile employees and distributed workforces, cloud-based TMSs are the obvious choice.
We know the importance of having centralized team collaboration. That’s why we use a cloud-based TMS that makes it easy for our clients to track the progress of their projects. Plus, their in-country staff can review our results when needed.
4. Be Ready to Adapt to the Needs of the Project
Each of the other website localization best practices in our list are based in technical advances. But, they all must be applied in an agile framework to make them work in your favor. If source material sits for months before it can be translated in a big batch, automating collection will not matter.
If you do not have a collaborative spirit or coherent plan, no amount of centralized communication will make up for it. And, teams must be equipped to take in and apply feedback in order for an in-context review to accelerate work.
We specialize in working with startups that want to expand to international markets, so we embrace lean, agile methodologies in our work. Slator goes into detail about how lean practices can benefit any localization project.
When it comes down to it, transformative translation speed relies upon teams committed to continuous operations, flexible responses, and proactive plans.
5. Automate the Process for Collection and Distribution of Content
In the past, companies would rely on a mix of manual methods for getting source material to translators and publishing completed work. But, this process is slow and creates an array of speed bumps.
As part of our website localization best practices, we offer an API that clients can use to send and receive text for translation from within their back end.
We also support CMSs, like WordPress and Drupal, through a connector or integration with our TMS. Customers can then submit and receive content from within their CMS. We don’t support or endorse proxies.
