10 Translation Management Hacks to Simplify Your Life (+33 more)
Managing your translated content can be a nightmare, right?
If you’ve been producing translated content for any length of time, you’re almost certainly familiar with the headaches that it can generate. There are already so many moving parts in your content creation workflow and translation only adds to this complexity.
Your team spends ages creating top-quality content that truly does the job you need it to. Then, you send the content to be translated... ... and it feels like you lose all control of it.
The translation takes far longer than you expect it to. You end up doing lots of extra engineering work to incorporate the translations (e.g. copy-pasting translated content into video subtitles, updating the graphic design to incorporate each new language).
The in-country reviewers send back copious notes and changes. Then, to top it all off, the translated content just doesn’t seem to work as well in your international markets as it did in your home market. And you don’t know why!
How can you keep on top of all this complexity!? Our clients often run into such problems before they come to us.
They are overwhelmed by the complications that arise when managing both their English content and the translations, often in multiple languages.
There are many potential actions you could take to make your translated content easier to manage. Everyone’s situation is different and your actions need to be tailored to your unique content creation workflow. However, here are 10 common content translation “hacks” (taken from our eBook of 33 hacks) that we often use when we work with clients to make their lives simpler. Hopefully, some of them will be useful to you...
1. Create a global content strategy
What people often forget to consider is that translation is only one part of their content strategy in their international markets. When you have a clear Global Content Strategy, you can ensure that you are creating translated content truly serves your business needs.
2. Treat translated content as a workflow
Too many people treat translated content as an add-on cost at the end of their content creation workflow. This loses them many opportunities to streamline their translation workflow upstream.
3. Do a global content audit
Before you can improve your translation management, you first need to know where you are starting from. A great way to assess your existing content is to do a global content audit. This helps you to get a clear picture of how your content fits together and where improvements can be made.
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4. Identify your level of content maturity
Managing your global content is not just about keeping on top of the translation files. It also means ensuring that your content is serving your wider global strategy and tracking the relevant Key Performance Indicators (KPIs). One helpful framework that we use to assess our clients' content maturity is the Globalization Maturity Model.
5. Optimize your source content for translation
In the world of computer science, there is a common adage “Garbage In, Garbage Out” which means that the quality of the input data determines the quality of your output content. While your English content is certainly not garbage, this adage is very relevant to translation. By optimizing your source content for translation, the translation process will produce a much better output.
6. Optimize content for reuse
Much of the money that is wasted on inefficient translations could be saved if people optimized their content for reuse. There’s no need to recreate and/or retranslate content that has already been created elsewhere. Read about a technique you can use to help optimize audio content for reuse here.
7. Consider using DITA
If you’re looking for a technological solution to help you with content reuse, an increasingly popular option is to use the Darwin Information Typing Architecture (DITA). This open XML architecture was specially designed to support content reuse and is widely used.
8. Use a translation memory
Another tool that can seriously help with content reuse is a good translation memory. This allows you to translate key phrases only once and then reuse those translations multiple times.
9. Remember the non-word content
A mistake that many content creators make when thinking about translation is to only consider the words. However, a lot of other content may need to be localized before it is ready for your international markets, including images, graphics, audio effects, and more.
10. Give translators your style guidelines
There are various materials that you can provide to your translators to ensure that the whole content creation process runs smoothly. Probably the most basic of these is to make sure they have a copy of your style guidelines. This reduces unnecessary work on your end and speeds up the whole translation process.