Insider's Guide to Language Translation Software for Business

You know what the potential is for taking your business around the world, right? Are you as well aware of what it takes to do it well? Too many companies underestimate the investment they should be putting into translation and localization. They believe it’s easy enough to cut corners with content localization.

But good enough isn’t necessarily good enough when you’re competing in new markets, trying to get the attention of foreign consumers. Not to mention—your cost-cutting methods may not be all that cost-efficient in the end, especially if you’re having to fix unnecessary mistakes along the way. It’s time to think seriously about language translation software for business that is already designed to optimize your localization workflow and your translation quality.

While the price tag will be higher than your stingy options, the right technology can save you a lot of wasted time and money down the road, and it can scale as you expand into more markets without skipping a beat.

Why Turn to Language Translation Software for Business?

Often, large companies will treat translations like office supplies: they have a standing order with a provider, but they don’t take it very seriously. The provider sends things in on time, and no one looks very closely. With an uncommitted system like this, you may have some people in the company handling translation in completely different ways. When you don’t have standards set, you can’t expect people to follow them—and you can’t expect to achieve the most efficient translation and localization strategy.

Translations are not like office supplies. They are not interchangeable. One wrong word could mean that your content is unusable or inaccessible. When the translation suffers, many things suffer as a result, including your product, sales, brand, employee satisfaction, and more.If senior leadership is not behind a strategy to make localization as efficient and effective as possible, that needs to be the priority.

They need to be able to accept that the high-stakes potential warrants the highest-quality localization solutions. And, really, when you reach for the best language translation software for business, you’re avoiding the need to manage it. The best localization platforms manage themselves. So, no more back-and-forth emails, file imports and exports, recruiting of translators, questionable translation quality, or mistakes in the local terminology.

Localization Software and the Importance of Centralization

A company may be unwilling to spend tens of thousands of dollars in advance for a centralized system because they don’t know if it’s worth it. But when you think about the scope of growth possible when you take your product around the world, it’s worth a lot. Many companies don’t even know how much they’ve been spending on translation already because they haven’t had a system in place to track it. And this kind of inefficiency likely echoes throughout the rest of their localization operations.Let’s look at what a centralized localization platform can actually do for you:

• Easily manage quality by tracking translator performance data
• Promote consistency by equipping your translators and reviewers with linguistic assets and ensuring proper development and maintenance of the same
• Track spending by translation type and language
• Automate content routing and assignments
• Maintain control and efficiency with an API connector or command line interface
• Scale to accommodate one language or many with the same efficiency and quality

Simply distributing localization duties throughout your organization doesn’t make sense. The people handling your global launches need to know what they’re doing. They need to be on the same page and working with a single source of truth to ensure consistency and that they are not reinventing the wheel again and again. You need a centralized team working on a centralized system.

Why Transparency Matters in Your Localization Ecosystem

Good language translation software for business is hard to find—largely because there continues to be a trend of deception running through the industry. But it’s not just your language service provider or localization tech vendor (ideally, they are one and the same partner) that you need to be accountable and transparent; the same should be expected of every member on your team, from the top down.

Everyone needs to be working toward the same clear goals. And everyone needs to be supporting everyone else along the localization pipeline. Your leaders need to commit to the quality and success of your translations if you are going to expect translators to give these projects their all.Why would you hand your localization projects completely over to a vendor and have no involvement in the progress of something so important? If they are not allowing you to see what’s going on, who’s working on the translations, and whether or not the quality has been verified, then it’s not a good investment of your resources. There is too much to gain from this next chapter for your business; and there’s too much to lose.

You need a partner who is as committed to your goals as you are. And if you’re still on the fence about whether your business needs language translation software, then you need a partner who can show you, very transparently, how this kind of ecosystem can set your company up for unprecedented success.