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Content operations Localization Podcast Podcast transcript

Conquering content localization: strategies for success (podcast)

Translation troubles? This podcast is for you! In episode 173 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Bill Swallow and special guest Mike McDermott, Director of Language Services at MadTranslations, share strategies for overcoming common content localization challenges and unlocking new market opportunities.

Mike McDermott: It gets very cumbersome to continually do these manual steps to get to a translation update. Once the authoring is done, ideally you just send it right through translation and the process starts.

Bill Swallow: So from an agile point of view, I am assuming that you’re talking about not necessarily translating an entire publication from page one to page 300, but you’re saying as soon as a particular chunk of content is done and “blessed,” let’s say, by reviewers in the native language, then it can immediately go off to translation even if other portions are still in progress.

Mike McDermott: Exactly. That’s what working in this semantic content and these types of environments will do for a content creator. You don’t need to wait for the final piece of content to be finalized to get things into translation.

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Content operations Localization Podcast Podcast transcript

Cutting technical debt with replatforming (podcast)

When organizations replatform from one content management system to another, unchecked technical debt can weigh down the new system. In contrast, strategic replatforming can be a tool for reducing technical debt. In episode 172 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Bill Swallow share how to set your replatforming project up for success.

Here’s the real question I think you have to ask before replatforming—is the platform actually the problem? Is it legitimately broken? As Bill said, has it evolved away from the business requirements to a point where it no longer meet your needs? Or there are some other questions to ask, such as, what are your processes around that platform? Do you have weird, annoying, and inefficient processes?

— Sarah O’Keefe

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Content operations Podcast Podcast transcript

Renovation revelations: Managing technical debt (podcast)

Just like discovering faulty wiring during a home renovation, technical debt in content operations leads to unexpected complications and costs. In episode 171 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Sarah O’Keefe and Alan Pringle explore the concept of technical debt, strategies for navigating it, and more.

In many cases, you can get away with the easy button, the quick-and-dirty approach when you have a relatively smaller volume of content. Then as you expand, bad, bad things happen, right? It just balloons to a point where you can’t keep up.

— Sarah O’Keefe

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Content operations

Collaborate with a content strategist to transform content operations

Does any of this sound familiar? 

  • Content production is taking too long, delaying product launches, business expansion, and growth into global markets. Every minute of delay costs your company—big time. 
  • Short-term fixes have evolved into long-term problems, creating technical debt, process inefficiencies, and more. 
  • Your content team is running on “emergency mode.” 

It’s time for a new way of managing content. Here’s how a content strategist can help you create successful content operations.

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Content operations Content strategy Localization

Technical debt in content operations

Technical debt is “the implied cost of future reworking required when choosing an easy but limited solution instead of a better approach that could take more time,” Wikipedia, “Technical debt.”. Like financial debt, technical debt isn’t always a bad thing. You can use a loan to buy a house right away (at least in the U.S.) and then pay off the debt over time while living in the house. Technical debt allows you to create something quickly instead of doing it exactly right and taking much longer. 

Too much technical debt, though, will hamstring your work. The trick is to find the Goldilocks solution.

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Content operations Webinar

Content Ops Forecast: Mostly Sunny With A Chance Of Chaos (webinar)

In this episode of our Let’s Talk ContentOps! webinar series, Scriptorium principals Sarah O’Keefe (CEO), Alan Pringle (COO), and Bill Swallow (Director of Operations) provide practical insights on the future of content operations. They’ll deliver sunny predictions, warn of upcoming storms, and equip you to weather unprecedented fronts in the content industry.

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Content strategy Localization Podcast Podcast transcript

Accelerate global growth with a content localization strategy

In episode 170 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Bill Swallow and Christine Cuellar dive into the world of content localization strategy. Learn about the obstacles organizations face from initial planning to implementation, when and how organizations should consider localization, localization trends, and more.

Localization is generally a key business driver. Are you positioning your products, services, what have you for one market, one language, and that’s all? Are you looking at diversifying that? Are you looking to expand into foreign markets? Are you looking to hit multilingual people in the same market? All of those factors. Ideally as a company, you’re looking at this from the beginning as part of your business strategy.

— Bill Swallow

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