5 Reasons You Need Business Translation Services to Localize Your Content

Companies on the brink of globalization may still misunderstand translation and localization. Now is the time to get clear on the critical steps forward to avoid common mistakes and to reap the full advantages that lie ahead. The best business translation services actually go beyond translation alone to help you prepare and plan for comprehensive localization. Don’t miss out.

What Business Translation Services Can Do for You

Behind every translation is a potential mountain of administrative tasks and quality management. A localization service can help these mountains feel like molehills, thanks to the high level of automation possible through a new-generation localization platform. And that is in addition to providing high-quality translation services with minimal oversight. Here are some of the specific ways a comprehensive localization service will make life easier and create more opportunities for your business.

1. Make a huge task manageable

A localization platform makes it possible to handle all your localization work in a single, centralized space. You can customize a localization dashboard to your specifications to allow for a scalable system that synchronizes with your company’s workflows. This centralization is a big boon for project management. The volume of work across the entire business is easily assessed on the platform and you can monitor and manage a large number and a wide variety of projects simultaneously.

2. Track and optimize the use of resources

A localization platform can be highly transparent and therefore support critical actions. In the platform, it’s easy to track spending, both by amount and by source. A localization partner can guide you to use its resources most cost effectively, such as by showing you when it’s in your best interests to set up integrations to carry out localization functions automatically—and when that’s not necessary.

3. Manage your terminology effectively

There is a set of technical, brand-oriented, and product-related terms that must be used consistently in order to build your market reputation and make your product successful. These words and phrases need to be contained in a term base along with information about how they are used in your various target languages. Once in-market reviewers approve these terms and uses, a centralized platform allows you to manage this consistency, ensuring that all linguists and reviewers are aware of these standards. And in order for this tool to be truly effective, editors and reviewers must keep it up to date whenever anything changes. In this way, you preserve a single source of truth and empower your quality product. Your localization platform can hold as many term bases as needed and automatically control levels of access.

4. Handle all of your media

You probably have translation requests coming in from all sides—the website, mobile app, marketing materials, documentation, in-house training materials, or other elearning content. Each type of media may require a different approach, perhaps different tools. It’s hard to imagine how complicated multimedia localization can really be until you’re facing it head on. Your localization partner can help you sort this out early. And that same partner can provide add-on services such as design adaptation, voiceover, and other engineering support. Letting the experts handle complicated multimedia localization is economically expedient, and it ensures that the work will be done to your standards.

5. Obtain statistical support

There are quality assurance data and KPIs on the localization platform that can be analyzed to streamline and optimize your workflows by favoring what works best. Localization activities can also be charted against sales to quantify their success. There can be questions about how much of your success in a given market can be directly attributed to localization. When you can show, for example, that sales in China went up 30% in the quarter after you launched a localized UI for your mobile app, you make a good inferential case for localization and have solid justification for your spending and a strong argument for continuing support. On the whole, a comprehensive platform allows for extensive tracking and plenty of data to analyze and leverage toward informed localization strategy and action.

Enjoy the Benefits of Localization

There are many business translation services, offering an assortment of products and levels of quality. Many of these companies simply send back a Word document with a translation of what you sent them originally, and that’s the extent of your interaction with them. If your company is dealing with a service like that, you are not taking advantage of all that the industry has to offer in terms of organizational support, additional services, and possibly even quality. That leaves you doing much more work than necessary using human resources on things that could be done faster and better with AI.