The concept of localization is to adapt a product or service to suit the needs of a target market. If your business operates on an international scale, you’re sure to face the difficulty of managing multilingual content, sooner or later.
In fact, it’s effective localization project management thatoften differentiates a good company from an outstanding one. If not done right, you will fail to address the needs and preferences of your target audience.
Continue reading to learn what localization management is and why it matters for (you need it for) the growth of your international business.
What is localization management?
Localization management is the way you plan and manage translation projects for different markets across the world. It actually refers to everything from structuring and organizing to monitoring and optimizing the whole process of adapting your product or content for use in other locales.
To make the most of localization management, you must ensure efficient workflows between all the processes and stakeholders. Many businesses would often achieve this by implementing a cloud based localization management platform or any other similar localization service or tool.
Why localization management is important?
It’s true that by offering an English-only product, you will be reaching an overwhelming majority of online users in the world. However, the statistics can actually shock you.
Do you know that English speakers make up only 26 percent of internet users? Yes, these are the stats. What about the rest of the world? They are waiting for you to provide them with content in their native language online. Hence, the need for localization.
But localization requires more than just the translation of your text from one language to another foreign language. It requires you to adapt various other elements of your product. This could be the user interface, layout, different functionalities, color palette, and more. And you are required to change them to fit the needs of each unique market.
It’s not a simple process. You will have to take into account many aspects such as linguistic, cultural, and political nuances when localizing your product or service offering. Plus, it requires different stakeholders to get involved in the process. There will be translators, project managers, editors, testers, developers, and localization managers. There’s even more to it. You will have to reconcile different workflows, file formats, and tools. All this can easily become an extremely time-consuming and tedious task when you try to centralize your localization efforts.
Lucky for you, there are many localization tools available that would make your localization process more efficient. Not only will you be to streamline and optimize all the processes but track the progress of your efforts, measure the results, and even manage relationships with your localization vendors.
Benefits of localization management tools
When you choose the right tool to manage your localization project, it will make it easier for you to control all the processes and reap many benefits. Here are some of the top benefits you can expect:
i) Increased productivity – When you use a localization management platform, it will offer you many amazing features that will speed up your localization process. Translation memory is one such feature. It allows you to create a database for all the content that has been previously translated. So, you don’t need to start from scratch every time. Rather, you can recycle the existing content which will boost your turnaround times.
ii) Monitoring and progress tracking – By using localization management tools or software, you will get complete visibility into your localization project(s). This means you would be able to track progress against different tasks and projects, assign them to different team members, see analytics, and more.
iii) Quality and consistency – All the best localization management tools bring along quality and consistency for each project. They will help keep your industry terminology and company branding consistent across all localization projects. This is due to their purpose-built features for such projects, like term basis and glossaries. These tools also enable you to check for formatting issues, incorrect tagging, typos, and much more. Hence, the quality of the text also improves.
iv) Improved collaboration – Since localization projects involve many stakeholders, the localization management tools will give them a single place to collaborate. Many tools allow users to leave comments for other stakeholders to review and provide feedback. Sharing screenshots and files with each other becomes easy. Everyone on the team can keep themselves updated on all the project details. So, it saves a lot of time because things are organized and streamlined.