Expanding your website globally comes with many benefits, but managing your multilingual content can equally come with hurdles. Translating website content can quickly become disorganized or inefficient if integration and standardized processes are lacking, or if several departments are handling the content. Ensure your organization is operating efficiently and productively by simplifying your multilingual translation management procedures.
Overcome common issues by adopting the following best practices-- and ultimately reach your global audience.
Build a strategy
Begin refining and simplifying your multilingual content management with a total overview of your organization, workflow and processes, the products you offer, and the goals you aim to achieve. Take it is an opportunity to assess what may not be working within your current localization procedures, and assess the best course of action needed to move forward with your multilingual content management strategy.
Gaining a clear overview of where your company started, understanding the current status, and where it is heading allows you to see what tools and people are needed to efficiently and successfully localize your content. Beginning with a concise strategy ensures all details and key components are covered, so nothing slows you down as you move forward with your content localization. Understanding potential obstacles, preparing strategies to prevent possible issues and planning how to deal with them if they do arise, ultimately saves you time.
Create a content map
Mapping out your localization system is a crucial component to managing multilingual content. When you begin creating your content map, the first step should always be the identification of each category of content within your company that is to be localized. Once you have separated the categories, distinguish the application or system that directs the content for each one.
From there, understanding the best way for your content to be localized and it becomes easier to determine if a manual entry suffices, or if API-based incorporation is required. This process gives you an idea of how a manual or automatic localization should play out, and which works best for your strategy.
Secondly, look at the people taking part in the localization of your content and the groundwork that is required to do so. This is an essential step as determining who is doing what and at which stage of the workflow helps help connect the human and tech systems more cohesively.
Allocate a leader
Leaders drive success, and all teams require a capable leader to be successful. You need to treat your localization process no differently. Your company needs an adept leader to oversee the entire multilingual content process from start to finish, ensuring your well thought out strategy is implemented precisely at all stages of the workflow. Allocating a solid team leader is critical to a smooth deployment across the whole company.
Centralize
If you are currently using multiple localization processes and different tools for your multilingual content, you are probably wasting your company’s time and money. Creating a robust management structure and using a core set of technology applications within your company is the best way to centralize your multilingual content process. This also safeguards your website and business as it continues to operate and reach your global audience. By having everything in one central spot, you can gain control and better manage the translation process for your website. Centralization of your multilingual content allows for more efficient completion of the translation process, creating a better customer experience and potentially generating more website traffic.
A translation management system is a great tool to systematize your resources effectively. The system operates as a storehouse for your multilingual resources, holding them all within one platform. By implementing a translation management system, all team members within the company playing a role in the localization process can access the system, creating a better quality translation process and freeing up time to be allocated elsewhere. The employment of an automated system leaves less room for human error and eliminates the tedious components of the process.
Why go with Andovar?
As you can see, there is a great deal of work and planning needed to ensure the successful implementation of a multilingual content management system. Though these best practices assist in simplifying localization of your multilingual content, calling on the help of a website localization agency such as Andovar guarantees the job is completed efficiently from the start.
A global provider of multilingual solutions, Andovar specializes in text translation, content creation, audio and video recording, software, games, and turnkey localization websites. Contact Andovar today to organize your new and improved multilingual content management system.
