Choose a Global Content Management System (GCMS) for Smart Localization

When most people think of content management systems (CMS), they think about content generation and content deployment, not necessarily content transformations.

When it comes time to take your company global, will you be prepared? It’s better to plan ahead with a global content management system (GCMS) than to retroactively prepare your content and your workflows once you’re already in full swing. When you engage with an integrated platform, it turns your content management system into a global ecosystem.

Why You Need a Global Content Management System

After your company begins the transition to global markets, you’ll face several immediate challenges related to task and resource management, quality, and localization industry expertise. Here are some of the solutions a GCMS can offer:

Streamlined Workflows

You may be managing many CMSs already. At a minimum, you’ll have an email system and a website system, and there could be others for customer support, direct mail, VIP members, internal use, and so on—each managed separately from the others. When you go global, the management tasks become much more complex. Besides potentially reproducing everything you do now in multiple languages, there are several new elements in the work mix:

• New connections within the organization. There will be more stakeholders. You will interact with requesters, translators, editors, and reviewers. They may be located throughout the world, in different time zones, and each of them will make a new kind of demand of the system.
• Many more pieces to keep track of. Imagine every single word you manage doubling, quadrupling, or reproducing itself fortyfold. And all of that still going through all of those CMSs in discrete string files that may have different formats, different routing, and different deadlines.
• New teams with new tools. There will be translators and editors, who will need translation memories and a single source of truth for terms and style guidelines. You’ll want to leverage all of your stakeholders’ expertise to compile these assets and keep them up to date at all times.

That can be a staggering amount of stuff to manage. If all of your work is on a single platform, processes can be streamlined and the workflow made more predictable. This high level of efficiency is also a crucial prerequisite for scalability.

Scalability with Consistency

Consistent language usage is a necessity for successful localization. If all of your content management systems do not flow through a single global content management system or localization platform, you may not be able to benefit from translation memories—which means you’re going to pay a lot more. Translation memories record translations that have already been approved (and that may surface again in future projects), so you can capitalize on those past efforts and ensure greater consistency with terminology and brand identity.

The translator saves considerable time using a well-developed translation memory, which saves you money.When the translation process becomes a streamlined, efficient system, it’s capable of scaling for new markets around the world without reinventing the wheel. Without automation and centralization, you’re holding yourself back.

Collaboration and Transparency

With the work flowing smoothly on a centralized platform, we can take advantage of opportunities to enrich the process. Transparency and collaboration go hand-in-hand to improve team engagement and content quality. It starts from your relationship with your language service provider (LSP). An LSP’s openness encourages confidence from the beginning of the partnership, and accountability and transparency spread throughout the content life cycle as translators, editors, requesters, and everyone benefits.All stakeholders have greater opportunities for success, working in an open, supportive environment where queries are made directly to the party concerned and information is easily exchanged. This improves translation quality and creates an atmosphere of engagement and enthusiasm. Furthermore, transparency is a necessary condition for automation, and allowing the platform to use algorithms to carry out administrative tasks saves everyone time to focus on meaningful responsibilities.

A Reliable Supply Chain

It’s good to be aware of the benefits when a centralized platform is truly end to end. If you buy a piece of software to turn content management systems into a global system, that’s a good first step. It will make your good content management systems global by bringing them together in a single platform where you can access and manage assets, integrate workflows, and automate. But you’re still going to be stuck because now you have to find translators. Having a global content management system is useless if you don’t actually have translators who live in that system, who are accessible and well trained. Having a reliable supply chain built into your platform is when the system really becomes an ecosystem.

Choose an LSP That Does What You Need

Rather than a translation company—that you swap emails with and hope for good-quality, market-focused content—you need an end-to-end integrated solution that includes translators, transparent data about the translators and your projects, and partners who know how to really make use of the system. Even if you devise a purely technological solution on your own, it won’t get you all the way to a thriving localization ecosystem.Partnering with a language service provider that can supply translators, translation tools, and a centralized platform gives you a competitive advantage since it frees you and your team to work on your product and your markets, rather than writing emails and trying to keep track of terminology for an ever-changing herd of translators. Best of all, no matter how far your product goes around the world and how much your localization efforts expand, you will have the systems in place to support the necessary workflows.