Think global, act global, go global (webinar)
Entering new language markets requires more than just translation. To succeed, people from across your organization need to collaborate and begin thinking globally. Bill Swallow talks about how to get started and provide a unified, localized customer experience.
“Going global is not a simple decision. You can’t just throw things out into the wild and expect them to be taken at face value. There are going to be language differences, there are going to be cultural differences, and there are going to be regulatory differences.”
—Bill Swallow
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Transcript:
Elizabeth Patterson: Hi, everyone and welcome to The Content Strategy Experts webcast. This presentation is Think global, act global, go global and it’s presented by Bill Swallow.
EP: The Content Strategy Experts webcast is brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way.
EP: I’m going to go over a couple of housekeeping items before we get started. Attendees are going to be muted during this presentation. But several of you have sent questions in when you registered and we have included those in the list that we’re going to answer at the end of the presentation. But if you have anything else that comes up while you’re watching, please drop those questions into the question module in GoToWebinar. If you will go ahead and locate that now so that you know where it is.
EP: Also, at the end of the session, I’ll be sending out a link to an evaluation. We’d really appreciate if you could fill that out to give us some feedback. That’s always very appreciated.
EP: I did want to talk about a couple of upcoming events that we have. We are going to do a followup video chat this coming Tuesday, September 1st at 3:00 PM Eastern time. This is an opportunity for you to join us via Google Meet for a video chat discussion about this webcast. You’re going to get to talk and ask us your questions. We would love to have you join us for that. I will be sending the link for that Google Meet tomorrow morning along with the link to the webcast recording. Be on the lookout for that. And again, we’d love to have you attend that.
EP: We also are going to be participating in a variety of different conferences that are coming up, ConVEx at the end of September along with UX Y’all, LavaCon at the end of October, and then also tcworld at the beginning of November. If you are participating in any of those conferences, we would love to connect with you virtually and you can find out more about what we’re going to be presenting and participating in at scriptorium.com/events.
EP: With that, I’m going to go ahead and pass things off to Bill. Bill, are you ready?
Bill Swallow: I’m all set. Thank you.
BS: Hi, everyone, Bill Swallow, I’m the director of operations here at Scriptorium. My focus is mainly on localization strategy, content strategy, and implementation of various strategic initiatives.
BS: Today, we’re going to be talking about going global. Even if you aren’t a global company, your market may be and even if your market’s not, there might still be some localization factors at play. This is probably relevant to just about everyone out there in some manner.
BS: Going global is not a simple decision. You can’t just throw things out into the wild and expect them to be taken at face value the same way, not be received the same way by different audiences. There are going to be language differences, there are going to be cultural differences, and there are going to be regulatory differences. Those are particularly the nastiest because they usually come with very real consequences.
BS: Just a few factoids from the Common Sense Advisory, they had conducted a survey a while back and what they found is that among consumers, over 70% of them, they prefer to browse the web in their own language and they’re more likely to buy a product if it’s targeted to their specific languages. Over 50% said that language is more important than price when making purchasing decisions. When you’re going global, localization really cannot be an afterthought.
BS: What we see more often than not is companies chasing after savings especially if you don’t know how to approach localization within your content itself. You end up squeezing that translation budget as tightly as you can and honestly, the greatest disservice that you can do for your company and for your customers is to hunt for translation bargains. You want to make sure that you are getting things done well and getting things translated well and basically having the same amount of effort that you’re putting in to a product and in content in your source languages. You want to make sure that’s being reflected in the translations as well.
BS: When we have companies coming to us for advice and for help, a lot of times localization is the number one issue that they are facing right now. They can’t scale it or they cannot do the things that they need to do in these localized markets. It all boils down to that they’re paying way too much money for problematic translations that take way too long to produce. That problematic translation part is particularly troubling because there are lots of factors here at play.
BS: Why might localization be inefficient? Why might translation be a problem?
BS: It goes to say that it’s important to get it right but a localization service provider or translator, they can commit to excellence and fit how they work well into every aspect that they have control over. But they have no control over any of your pieces. If you aren’t using a style guide, if you are not managing your terminology, and people are using conflicting terms for the same thing, if your writing just isn’t good or if your formatting is all over the place, it’s going to make it a lot more difficult for your translators to get in there and do what they do best.
BS: They’re going to have questions. Why did they use this word over here versus this word in another context over there? Which one is correct? And how should I translate this? Do they both get translated the same way or should I use two different words in the translation?
BS: The translators, they have control over their workflow, they have control over how professional of a translator they use particularly with localization firms. They have control over this person is medically trained and knows software and therefore is a prime candidate to work on this medical device or this medical software.
BS: They have translation memory in play. They can look back and say, “This is how we translated it in the past.” And they can make some really good decisions on how to translate your stuff based on what they did in the past. They do have the benefit of having an in country reviewer.
BS: But as you look at this, given the translators have all of this control over how they work and how they produce the translation, it becomes pretty clear where the translation problems start to creep in and it’s definitely not on their side more times than not. So we need to start determining value as to what translation means in your company. It’s not always an easy task.
BS: But it does break down to these three things, as always, cost, quality, and time. Right back to that that nagging issue that we see a lot of companies come to us with, it’s taking way too long to produce poor translations and it costs way too much. There are your three factors right there.
BS: Let’s look at the cost. A lot of times, we take a perspective of how lean can we get this cost, how little can we pay for translation. When we look at quality, we take a look at however free can we get it and in time, how quickly can we get it done. There’s really no value to the cost factor in determining value other than just saving some pennies on the dollar. That’s about as good as you can get. It’s all about how cheap you can get that cost. Decrease spending definitely doesn’t equate to increased value. You just can’t go that way. If you decrease the cost, chances are quality is going to go down as well.
BS: Quality has value but it comes with an increased cost because you’re paying for higher quality translators or you’re paying for a professional service vendor, an LSP, to have all of these other mechanisms in play and you’re paying for that process, that project management and everything else. Is money well spent? Usually, it is. It’s a little bit subjective, but in my opinion, it definitely is worth it.
BS: And then time, it’s the padding at the end of a project that basically you’re waiting for the translation to happen. The duration of the localization activities is not usually measured as a value. But it does come into play.
BS: The true value that you really should be looking at is getting things to people sooner, the time to market. If you can reduce the amount of time it takes to get translations out the door into your market, that’s really where the value is because delays don’t produce revenue and in many cases, yes, translation is a legal requirement in some market and going to someone and saying, “We can provide you the English product now, but we can get you the translation maybe in about six months.” That really says to the customer that you’re just not that important to us and you’re just going to have to wait.
BS: Some examples here. English knowledge is very high in Germany. However, their acceptance of English only products is very low. Even though they can speak English well, they can read English well, probably better than our English-speaking people can. But the Germans, they really want things in their language. They’re a bit persnickety about this. It’s a cultural issue. In order to go for a German market share, you really have to have a German translation.
BS: On the flip side, English knowledge in Poland is much lower but they don’t necessarily have a demand for you must have a Polish product or we’re not going to use it. It’s not a preference. They’re looking at it saying, “I need it in Polish.” It’s not a cultural issue like it is in Germany, but it’s a necessity for them.
BS: How do we bridge this localization gap as a company?
BS: The first thing is to really start thinking about what going global means to you as a company and start thinking about, “This isn’t just about getting stuff translated and sent over to other markets.” This really involves a lot of interdepartmental collaboration within your company. Having the product writers talking to the marketing writers talking to tech support and talking to sales and talking to anyone else who has anything to do with engagement with a customer and making sure that there is a plan in place to make things happen well.
BS: You have to be willing to invest in skills and solutions that support your goal for sending content and sending product to multiple language markets. You need to also start thinking about what is the extent of translation and localization that you need.
BS: Do you need to translate everything? Do you need to translate just a little bit to satisfy a market need? Do you need to not translate but you just need to be aware of cultural issues or just make sure that you have the whole Imperial-metric measurements, things sorted out for each market? You what type of translation do you want to use? Do you go with human translator? Do you go with machine translation? Do you go with a bit of both? Do you throw it all to the wind and say, “No, we’re going to recreate content from scratch for these particular markets.” That would be transcreation for the most part.
BS: Do you need to modify layouts and interfaces? What is the cultural fit that you’re looking for? If you’re doing software, is a desktop application enough? Or is your market primarily mobile users? Do they not have wired internet or do they not have localized broadband? Do they use cellular networks only? How are they going to get the data? What is the representation on screen going to look like?
BS: And then looking at your relative time to market, do you want to use traditional waterfall approaches to translation where you author everything and develop everything up front and then your source language is done and then you worry about translation? Or do you want a more iterative approach?
BS: As I mentioned a little bit earlier, collaboration across your company is key to getting this thing done and collaboration with your localization vendors is key to getting this thing done.
BS: You got to be able to share that knowledge and start looking at opportunities to start writing things more consistently across the different areas in your company, being able to control the reuse situations that you have going on, making sure that you’re not writing the same thing two, three, four, five, multiple times and potentially modifying that wording slightly. Look into co-authoring so that you can actually have multiple people sitting down and you’re making sure that the message is right once and use it everywhere.
BS: We’ll talk a little bit about willingness to invest and by investment I mean in infrastructure, that might be on the authoring side, that might be in internal localization workflows. Maybe you invest in your own translation management system so that you are able to have that finer control over how and when things go out to translators and which translators the information goes out to.
BS: What workflows you have in place? When does stuff go for translation? How is the approval process managed? Looking into skills training, is everyone aware of what they need to know in order to meet the demands for interacting with global markets? And then just looking at your overall information, architecture, your product architecture, and how you develop product and content going forward.
BS: Over the years, we’ve talked with many, many companies and throughout this presentation, I’ll be dropping in a few random quotes, things that we heard and raised an eyebrow over the years. Here’s one of them here, and I’m sorry for the doom and gloom, but it seems that these comments always seem to coincide with doom and gloom.
BS: One is, “It’s too hard.” Yes, nothing worthwhile is ever easy. But the trick is to keep things manageable and when you get something down pat, make sure that you’re consistent about doing it over and over and over again. Tackle these things in waves or in pieces and make sure that you have your arms around something before you tackle the next piece of the localization puzzle. If you’re having a lot of trouble getting everyone to write in the same direction, so to speak, then maybe your first focus is getting that style guide nailed down.
BS: But regardless, you wouldn’t run a marathon without training for it first, I hope. Make sure that you take these baby steps and that you work up to the end goal and not just try to jump all in and just say, “We have to get this out to these 27 different language markets as soon as possible.”
BS: This is where having a localization strategy is critical. You want to employ it for all content, for all of your products, for all of your messaging. And that’s all in addition to managing the translation process itself.
BS: You want to have a localization strategy for lots of different aspects of how you’re going to be communicating with people. You want to have it for the technical content, you want to have it for the marketing content, you want to have it for your product development and your UI. You want to have it for your salespeople that how they interact with people, you want to have it for your tech support. Basically, any customer facing aspect of your company has to be accounted for in your localization strategy if you want to have a unified approach and a unified means of managing your messaging.
BS: If it’s content of any kind, yes, you have to make sure you have a plan for it.
BS: With a localization strategy, you have a few things that you really need to be mindful of. First of all is showing the value of the translation that comes back. If you are spending hundreds, if not thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars translating for a specific market and you’re just not seeing the return there, then maybe that’s not the market you need to be hitting. Or maybe it is and it’s just going to take five years to show that return on investment. But you need to be able to show the value of what you’re doing versus the amount of money you’re spending and what the return for that money is.
BS: A big piece of this is to get buy in from the top. You want to have executive approval for everything. Be very mindful about what translation approach you choose and if you’re a software development, any kind of content development, which pretty much is anyone out there, even product development. Essentially, if you are producing anything for another person, you want to try to internationalize everything, and we’ll get into that a little bit more later.
BS: Quick note that you must try to own your translation memory and that’s where having an internal translation management system is really key for a lot of companies, and I know many, many companies that actually have invested in having their own localization group internally, not translators, but just people who manage the process and manage the translation.
BS: You want to make sure that you review and test everything very heavily in all those different languages. You never know when something is going to run off a page, when buttons on user interface are going to not be big enough for some of the translations and so forth. You also need to be able to govern all of this well.
BS: Another quick quote that we’ve seen in the wild, “How about if we just translate the most important information?”
BS: My first question when I hear this is why are you giving people unimportant information? And then who decides which information is most important? It’s a slippery slope and it’s a question that basically begs can we just translate less. And the answer is a little more complicated than yes or no.
BS: The first thing we need to do to be able to answer that question is to flip the entire process on its head and start at the endpoint. What requirements and limitations do your markets have? Who is using your product or services? What are their expectations? And how are you going to meet them?
BS: For anyone who’s been in writing for a while, it sounds rather familiar. It goes back to the whole audience first principle. If you’re in technical communication or if you’ve studied content development of any kind, then you know that the audience is critical. It’s a phrase that’s been beaten to death, but it’s 100% true and it’s never more important than it is with localization.
BS: Talk a little bit about getting buy-in from the top, involving your executives. Pretty much any strategy you implement needs an executive champion of some kind and this helps you get your arms around all of the various people who need to be involved to plan and execute your strategy. It makes it a lot easier to cut through a lot of the noise that you hear that gets in the way of making progress on a project.
BS: What kind of noise you might hear? Here’s a good one, “Our system can’t handle Polish letters.” Just because you developed a product and decided to do it in a way that didn’t handle certain character sets doesn’t mean that you can’t go into that market. Why didn’t you design for that? This is a classic example of not knowing your audience, not considering what their needs are, and what their expectations are before developing a product and trying to send it out to them.
BS: In this case, if you run into a situation where we can’t handle this particular character set, we can’t handle this language in our product or in our content or what have you, you’re back to the drawing board. In order to plan for that correctly, you need to start looking at your target markets again and working your way backwards.
BS: In order to do that, I highly recommend internationalizing every aspect of how you develop things, content, product services, what have you. We’re looking at software, the UI text, any labels that you’re producing for machinery or for hardware, any style sheets that you haven’t used, any templates or transformations that you’re doing, making sure that they handle things, any images that are out there, making sure that if you have an image and you’re doing call outs that you’re mindful that maybe we can reuse the image for every language and just overlay a different translation of the text on top of that image rather than having multiple images all the time.
BS: Terminology, what terms should you use to describe something? What terms should you not use to describe something? What terms are highly problematic when they’re translated a certain way for a certain market? And is it the same term for every language? Or is there a regional expectation that shifts the word you use when you translate a particular term from your source language into that target language? And of course style guides to manage all of this.
BS: One size certainly does not fit all. You would think that just because you translated something into Spanish that would be understood anywhere in the world where people speak Spanish. That’s just simply not true. There are nuances that certain geographies bring. Certainly, if you go into Latin America, you’re going to have a very different flavor of Spanish than if you went to Spain and even if you went from somewhere like Los Angeles and then compared it to Southern Florida, you’re going to have very different dialects that are in play and different translations and different words are used interchangeably for different things.
BS: You need to design not to set expectations. We don’t want to set the expectation that every plug must be round. We want to meet the expectations and say there might be square ones, there might be other shaped ones that need to fit into this socket.
BS: When you internationalize everything, what I’m talking about is essentially removing any boilerplate stuff from the content itself or from the product itself and putting it to the side and managing it separately. This eliminates a lot of extra work because you’re not constantly tinkering with the nuts and bolts of whatever it is you’re producing, a user guide, a bit of software, a website, what have you.
BS: You have a design that is designed to ebb and flow with the changes from one language to another rather than having to go back and make constant modifications along the way. It also allows you to quickly identify and correct problems when you are designing because you can start flowing in dummy translations and using interchangeably different bits of text in a lot of your internationalized resources and then dumping them into the user interface, for example, of a website or an application and seeing what happens.
BS: Do the buttons actually expand and contract with the texts that are contained within it? Does the form field suddenly run out of space? Does this text drop off the page or drop out of view? Does it scroll off to the side on a phone? These are lots of things that you can test before you actually get to translation and discover the problems down the road for every problem that you can fix early on.
BS: I think it comes back to a lot of people using the 1-10-100 rule, where you design for it upfront costs you one. If you find issues in the course of the design process, it’s going to cost you a factor of 10. If you find an issue once you ship something, it’s going to cost you a factor of 100 to fix it. The very same issue. If you design up front, it’s one cost all the way down to finding out later that you screwed up and your market is angry at you can cost factors of 100 more. And of course, it expedites the production of whatever you’re producing.
BS: When we’re choosing different types of translations, it’s important to choose wisely. There are lots of nuanced ways of looking at this. I’ll talk about the three buckets we have up here. We have human translation, machine translation, and transcreation.
BS: Within the human translation bucket, we could have a single human doing the translation for one language for one market for you, soup to nuts. They just do the whole thing or you have a team of people that do it or you’re crowdsourcing. All of these different variations of using people to do the translation is all pretty much lumped into that first bullet there.
BS: Machine translation, could be using something on the web, could be using artificial intelligence, perhaps a server or a service that you’re using is using machine translation.
BS: And then we get into transcreation, which is more or less, writing from scratch using the sources of guide. We see a lot of products doing transcreation or a lot of brands doing it to enter various markets. We’ll get into that a little bit later.
BS: But first, another quote and this I’ve heard quite often. “Just let our regional sales team do the translation. They’re already over in Japan or wherever so let them just translate everything. They know everything about the market, just let them do it.” There are a few problems with this approach.
BS: The first one is that it’s unregulated. You have no control over the translation work that they’re doing. There’s usually no repeatable process because they’re just taking whatever information they get and they’re just retyping it in a different language. You have zero control of quality. A lot of times they’re strapped for time and they just need to get things out the door. They might cut corners. You just don’t know. You certainly have no translation memory leverage because they’re working on their own, doing a little rogue translation work.
BS: The biggest factor here thinking about, “We’ll just let our regional sales team or our regional office do the translation,” is that they have day jobs. They were hired for a reason and it wasn’t to translate your stuff. They have lots of better things to be doing. There are more qualified people who should be doing your translation work.
BS: This goes without saying but the use of machine translation is ever increasing. We see it a lot even in phone apps and such where you can just translate on the fly as you go. Certainly, if you use Google Chrome as your browser, it’s always trying to translate websites for you. We even see it in Facebook where someone may or may not type something in another language, but Facebook will think it’s a different language and they will offer a translation and usually it’s quite laughable.
BS: We’ll talk a little bit about the difference between using humans and using machine translation. We’re not 100% at a point where we can rely on artificial intelligence to do translation work, but we’re getting there. Here are some of the differences that we need to keep in mind is that humans are great with things like tone, style, and nuance. They understand the various flavors that you can add to language to make it pop.
BS: Machines are really great at terminology and about using predictable language. They look for patterns and they say, “This pattern has been used before. We’ve translated this a million times before. Here’s a translation that matches the pattern. Boom, perfect, great.”
BS: But there’s a big gray area in between the two that you can benefit from using machine translation because it does take a lot of that time crunch out of the equation. At the same time, you can benefit from using people even if it’s working behind the AI and cleaning up after it because they really understand what the wording needs to be to engage a particular market because not all markets and not all language markets are created equal.
BS: Back to transcreation, I mentioned that a lot of brands are doing this. We see this a lot with brands like Coca-Cola. Even their company name and their product name is usually translated to something phonetically similar to Coca-Cola that may have a particular meaning in that language. It’s really ideal for doing a lot of custom messaging to make sure that people really get what your product is about, to really understand that product.
BS: We see a lot of transcreation being used mainly on the marketing side because if you’re making an emotional appeal, you want to make sure that language is written specifically for that audience. You are really digging into what they both expect and what you want them to want from you as a company. You want to make that language really speak to them and resonate with them.
BS: All of this transcreation work happens during the source language planning, because anything that you write in English, you want to be able to make sure that it’s something that can be conveyed to another writer for another language. It’s highly effective, especially in marketing, but it’s extremely expensive because at that point, you’re paying someone to write from scratch in every single instance, every single language, every single location to where you’re targeting people.
BS: To do this properly, you have to really form strong partnerships with local market experts, people who know the expectations in a particular region, in a particular area of the world. You need to be able to convey all the intent and the approach that you want to take with your messaging to those people so that they can then bring that same intent and approach in their language, in their cultural environment, to that audience.
BS: Collaborate on those targeted messaging and make sure that if messaging works for 90% of your markets and then one person raises the hand and says, “We can’t even touch that subject over here.” Maybe you develop a slightly different approach for that one market or if consistency is really important, then you bring it all back and say, “Okay, we’re going to take that into consideration and we’re going to develop a slightly different approach here.” And you always test locally before deploying in a transcreation scenario. You’re doing all that market research as you go.
BS: There’s another fun quote for you, and I’m sad to say that yes, I have heard this personally. It’s usually the reaction by this point as well because there’s a lot of work that goes into localization that people don’t usually think about and once you start bringing it up, you get a lot of glazed eyes, which I hope we’re not getting on the other side of this webcast.
BS: But wait, there’s more. Choosing translation workflows is also important just as you have a choice of translation and a choice of how to approach that, you also have a choice of methods. Again, for simplicity’s sake, we’ll boil it down to three basic methods. The first one is waterfall, second one is parallel, and the third is agile or iterative. If you work in software development, these words are probably very familiar to you. But we’ll go through them just in case.
BS: Waterfall, first of all, looks like this, where you have your source language, you go ahead and develop that and you deliver that and then you say, “Now, let’s work on the localization.” We bring in the translators, we send the content out, they do their whole check and everything, and then you’re able to deliver the languages as they’re being completed. You might delay the language delivery anywhere up to probably about six months or so. I’ve seen it longer in some cases depending on exactly what’s being translated. But you get the gist that it’s a long process from when the source is done that you get your translations back.
BS: The good aspect is that when you approach this, everything’s done on the source side. There’re no changes, nothing else, and your translators have the complete context available to them to get the translation work done. On the bad side, of course, is that delay, if you want to be able to ideally engage those markets sooner.
BS: For parallel localization scenario, we look at developing the source language and doing some localization as we develop the source language. At some point, then you have a cut process where you say, “We have to button up the source.” You get that done then you send the entire package with the partial localization work that you’ve done in that iterative process and send it all out for translation which then you can complete and then deliver. We see a bit of a time reduction there. If you notice, we’re looking at maybe three months instead of six months. But it’s still a bit of a delay there. There’s some delicate balancing acts that need to happen in that source and localization development phase over on the left.
BS: The good part is that if it’s the waterfall source development model without so much of a crunch at the end but in the bad, if you make changes to the source at any point in time, you need to make changes to the translation as well. You could have a lot of churn going on the left if you’re not careful.
BS: And finally, with the agile approach, much like agile source development for products and for software, you take things a bit at a time. You do everything and button up that particular feature. You might be working on one piece, let’s say, one particular feature in a product. You’re documenting that one feature in the product and you’re translating that one feature in the product, all that information is done.
BS: The benefit there is that usually if you’re targeting a release schedule using agile for your product development, then your content development follows suit and your localization process follow suit and you’re able to do pretty much a simultaneous release or sim ship as we like to say, where you’re delivering your target language and your source language at the same time.
BS: The great part about this is that it’s all done at once and you’re able to ship it all at the same time. There’s no delay for people waiting for the translation. The bad part is that it really requires an excellent agile development and documentation workflow in order to make this work. In many cases, I know I’ve heard in many conferences we’re just not there or many companies are just not there with having a one for one agile software and documentation process in place. Getting there but still not there.
BS: Your choices do matter. The type of translation, it definitely informs the content and product design work that you’re doing. The type of workflow also informs the project and release schedules. You have to take a look and say, “What makes the most sense for us?”
BS: If you’re sitting over in the waterfall side and things have been going great but you really wish you can get stuff out cheaper, maybe start looking at that iterative approach where you’re doing a little bit of simultaneous localization as you’re developing content, as you’re hardening content. Maybe you write a chapter, you get it reviewed, you get it approved, and before you release the entire manual, you send that chapter off for localization. But you have to also keep your corporate culture in mind because changing too much at once usually ends in tears more than not.
BS: A quick note about translation memory which is used on the translator side to keep track of what they’ve translated before so that they can leverage that going forward usually makes translation a lot smoother and a lot more consistent.
BS: Remember that regardless of whether or not they’re producing the translation memory, it’s your intellectual property. You want to make sure that you do own it, that you can send it out to translators as they need to work on projects, that they give it back to you, that you can review and clean it up. This requires you to have some target language expertise in house usually or you have a service that comes and does that for you. But basically, this gives you the ultimate control over the quality of your translations going forward.
BS: A quick note here that I always like to put in there is only work with translation providers who give you full rights over the translations and translation memory. A lot of times, we see translation in shops, not so much anymore, but it was a really big issue in the ’90s and early 2000s where they would use it as a bargaining chip to keep you on board as a client and that’s just bad practice. You should have ownership and if they’re humming and hawing about giving you that right, then maybe you need to find another translator.
BS: Let’s talk a tiny bit about review and testing. But first, as you would find in review and testing, you get languages that might not go from left to right. We have certain languages like Arabic and Hebrew where it flows from right to left. We don’t want to find this out in testing. But honestly, testing is a better way of finding out than in production.
BS: What are we talking about with review and testing? We want to do the same level of testing for the translations that we do with the source. That means the translated product gets tested the same way as the source developed product. Same with the content gets the same level of review and same level of hopefully QA that your product does. Being able to catch and correct all of those usability issues up front is critical because quality is critical to success and this ensures that you have the same level of quality for everyone going out there.
BS: Happy customer is great because it means increased sales, greater promotion of your company because they’re going to be talking you up and saying, “This stuff is great. I can work in it in English or I can choose to work in it in my own language. It works perfectly in both. I can understand it beautifully in both. There are no errors. This is great. You should definitely give these people your money if you’re looking for this product.” That’s the stuff you want to have happen.
BS: In order to get all this done, sometimes you have to lay down the law and governance is absolutely critical. As you go and develop your strategy, you want to make sure that you’re documenting everything, document all the decisions, all the agreements, who’s responsible for what, when in the process they’re going to be responsible for that, make sure that if there are any standards that need to be followed that those are defined and communicated.
BS: Make sure that any expectations around how people approach their work and the quality of their work is being set. Building that accountability into every single phase of the process from the design to the creation, to the localization, all of those factors, you need to have accountability built in.
BS: When things fall through the cracks, when things slip, take immediate corrective action that doesn’t need to be you coming in and slapping people around and laying down the law. But you want to make sure that things are brought up and resolved in a very timely manner and that nothing is just shooed to the side saying, “Let’s just not worry about that right now.” You definitely don’t want that happening.
BS: With that, that’s pretty much the end of me talking into the void and hopefully now we have some questions that I can answer for you.
EP: Thank you so much, Bill. I do have a couple of questions here and if you have any other questions at this time, if you would go ahead and drop them into the question module in the GoToWebinar control panel.
EP: The first question is, how/when does diversity or lack thereof in writing and developer teams intersect with localization requirements and goals?
BS: Always? It’s always a good way to start. Diversity always helps in any team situation. But the more important thing, regardless of whether you have the diverse team or not, is making sure that you do have the strategy and approach developed and that everyone is on the same page. Regardless of whether you have someone who’s representative of every possible market that you’re trying to address on your development team or on your writing team, those particular issues are explained and documented so that you can cater to them and have a plan for them going forward. You’re not just hoping that the translator gets it right.
EP: Okay, great. Thank you. Another question here. When is the best way to tackle approximations in offering measures given in metric to standards such as grams, meters, celsius. Is there time it’s better for us to just start thinking in metric?
BS: I’d love for everyone to think in metric. We’re almost there. We have three and a half countries that are holdouts. One of them is the country that the Imperial measurement came from that the three and a half of us still use. That would be the U.K. The U.S. is certainly another one that’s sitting out there in the Imperial side and we got two others out there. But the rest of the world pretty much all uses metric.
BS: That aside, it really depends on how you handle that, depends on the need, first of all, and where you’re developing information and product for, what their expectations are, again, comes back to knowing your audience and knowing the particular subject matter as well. And also, it really depends how you handle that depends on a few other things. It depends on what the expectations are for that content and if there’s any regulatory information that says it must be formatted this way. In some cases, you might have a very specific way of supplying both. It’s a standard accepted way of doing this. We see this a lot in scientific documentation, scientific content.
BS: Likewise, if you’re able to say, “We’ll supply Imperial measurements for the United States and we’ll supply metric for the rest of the world or minus those other three countries.” There are different ways of doing that. At that point, it becomes more of a tools discussion. How are you developing this content? How does the tool that you’re using to write the content handles swapping between those two? How does the localization… How does the CAT tool or the computer-aided translation tool handle metric versus Imperial? In some cases, it automatically will flag it and say, “This is a measurement. Do we want to handle this differently?”
BS: There are lots of more technical issues that need to be looked at in order to answer that question. I hate to say it but it depends. Classic consultant response.
EP: Okay. In the meantime, if you guys have any other questions, please drop them into the question module now. I have gone ahead and dropped the link to our evaluation into the chat. If you could take just a minute to fill that out for us, we would really appreciate it. You can also send any other questions to [email protected]. I dropped that in the chat as well.
EP: Please be sure to join us for the after show video chat this coming Tuesday, September 1st. I am going to be sending out a link to the Google Meet for that video chat tomorrow morning along with the recording of this webcast. Look out for that in the email that you’ve registered for this webcast with. We also hope to see you at some of these upcoming events and be able to connect with you virtually for those. You can also follow us on Twitter at @scriptorium to follow for updates, conferences, webcasts, all of that sort of thing.
EP: I don’t see any more questions at this time. I think that we’re going to go ahead and wrap up. Thank you so much, Bill.
BS: Thank you.
EP: And thank you all for attending The Content Strategy Experts webcast. We hope to see you at some of these conferences. Thank you.
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