Whether you’re experienced in international business or expanding into your first new market, localization services are vital to your success. Four key elements can help you handle the translation process like a pro. For a smooth market expansion, optimize your language service provider (LSP) usage, build robust translation style guides, and focus on centralization and timely internationalization. These four elements will simplify localization for your company.
A translation project is often deeply complex. A professional translation project requires project management, desktop publishing, file engineering, and more. LSPs bring years of experience and can provide a scale and breadth of resources difficult to replicate internally. With offerings like language and localization strategy consulting, LSPs can leverage their experience to help you set strategy. A good LSP can help you decide which markets to target, which languages to support, and which content is most critical to localize. This leaves you free to focus on your core business.
The right LSPs can also safely automate your localization process with Large Language Models (LLMs). LSPs like Lionbridge offer dedicated teams of AI experts to ensure we handle projects optimally and negate cyber/data security risks. AI solutions are a gamechanger, but only with a human-in-the-loop by Lionbridge experts.
To make the most of your LSP, you need to set goals for consistency. Before they decide to use an LSP, many companies choose to leverage their own in-country employees to check their translated material.
This approach might be sufficient to catch errors in regional translations. But something important can be denigrated along the way: the company’s brand voice and identity. It’s crucial to create a translation style guide to define a company’s style in multiple languages, as well as essential phrases or unusual terms. This helps maintain a unified voice across markets, engendering trust among customers across markets.
These guides are also helpful for translators you work with through your LSP. Rather than rely on the personal preference of in-house employees, your brand can leverage style guides to stay aligned across languages from the start of the translation and transcreation process. This tactic saves time, effort, and costs upfront.
If you use an AI solution, you can feed it your style guide before the translation process, ensuring its output aligns with your brand’s voice and expectations. If you use AI to review Machine Translation output, you can provide the style guide, ensuring a better, more customized final result. It can also update terminology in content to match any new terminology in your style guide.
For further streamlining, consider centralizing the translation process by using a single LSP. To do this effectively, you’ll need to pick a multi-language vendor (MLV) to set yourself up for future expansion. Centralizing resources eliminates communication challenges and decreases the likelihood of inconsistency across markets. It also simplifies billing.
These factors are especially impactful as you expand markets. With a predictable cost per language, you can more easily decide whether you can afford to add new markets to your sales operation. Centralization also increases accountability, which helps you decide whether to maintain your chosen MLV. In addition, streamlining decreases the chances that work—and thus costs—will be unnecessarily duplicated.
Ensure your product or service is internationalized before localizing. Consider these questions:
Is your core business offering already available in other markets?
Do you need to update or re-engineer your product to suit other countries and languages?
Have you considered the legal repercussions of selling in a new market?
Be sure to address your functionality requirement in other languages before localizing the more content-centric parts of your process.
LLMs are providing new ways to improve and enhance your localization processes. As generative AI and LLMs mature, there will be a significant increase in quality and uses of Machine Translation. AI solutions will help automate every step of the localization process, saving considerable time and costs. For optimal localization, work with an LSP, Like Lionbridge, that is already developing safe, secure, AI-powered localization services.
Ready to get started with a localization project? We can assist with the entire process, end-to-end, or offer a customized solution. Rely on our decades of experience and innovative new technology to tailor language services solutions to your unique needs. Get in touch today.
