Matt Grech
Content Marketing ManagerSmartling
If your brand wants to expand business and unlock new revenues around the world, you’re going to need translation and localization.
Whether they’re creating products (with their packaging and instructions) or content itself (from apps to websites to blogs to books), just about every single business will need to translate for a global experience.
Now, we all know that managing content for your native experience can be tricky, let alone introducing an entirely new language. That's where translation software comes in, to manage and organize all of your localization efforts into one platform.
Simply put: if business needs translation work done, then you need a Translation Management System like Smartling. Here’s why.
Why Your Brand Needs a Translation Management System
Everything we do now is content. From hailing a ride in an app, to booking your latest doctors appointment, reading the news or watching movies. Brands produce a lot of content, and when they need to translate, that volume doubles, triples, or quadriples.
To stay organized, your brand needs both a translation strategy or process, and a cloud-based translation management system to help manage that process for a whole host of reasons. Its just like how are your business needed a content management strategy and content management system (CMS) at some point in the past.
The amount of content your business was creating was becoming, well, difficult to manage, so you purchased a specialized tool to help you keep that content organized and clean.
And in a nutshell, that’s why you need a translation management system, too. All the organizational issues you were (or are) having as a result of manually tracking and processing your content? It gets far, far worse when you localize.
Generally, working with translators means emailing spreadsheets with strings back and forth, constantly making revisions and juggling files, resources and communication. You need powerful tools to keep it all straight, and that’s where our cloud translation management system (TMS) comes into play.
The Biggest Benefits of a Cloud TMS
We’ve given you the big-picture reason why your brand needs a translation management system. Now let’s dig into the details. Here are five of the top benefits you’ll gain when you start using a Cloud TMS.
1. A Cloud TMS saves you time
First, you’ll save a ton of time by using our cloud translation management system. With Smartling’s powerful automated workflows, content moves quickly and smoothly through the platform and doesn’t wait around for human intervention.
With a cloud TMS, all you have to worry about is creating the content in your native language, and your TMS does the rest. It can automatically retrieve content that’s ready for professional translation, send it to translators, and automatically deploy it back to the right location when the projects are complete.
Imagine how much capacity you could free up by no longer having to chase down translators to fix errors, or manually post all of your localized content. And at scale, this only becomes even more significant.
Translators themselves can also work faster within a TMS. Everything you’ve translated previously is stored in a Translation Memory database for instant and automatic translation the next time those strings appear. The more content that is translated, the bigger your TM database grows, and the quicker translators can work.
Smartling also has a built-in Issues Management functionality for translators to quickly raise any questions or concerns and localization managers to respond with the clear direction, right within the platform. Ultimately, a cloud TMS dramatically cuts down on time wasted both through the management of projects, and the translations themselves.
2. A Cloud TMS saves you money
Not only does a cloud-based translation management system save you time, it also saves you money. With a complete overview of all your translation projects, localization managers can make decisions on how to best carry out each job.
For example, brands can utilize machine translation for lower priority content to save on the labor costs of human translation. This is great for user-generated content for example, where the talent and creativity of a human translator isn't necessary, and the sheer volume of content would introduce a significant resource drain. Meanwhile, professional translators should be leveraged for your higher priority content.
Through constant TM leverage, brands can also cut down on the overall cost of each individual translation job. Part of the beauty behind Translation Memory isn't just the time savings, but cost savings as well. Once a term is translated and stored in the TM, you never have to pay for that translation again, it'll just automatically be applied when the string appears in future jobs.
Another great feature of Smartling in particular is our dynamic project estimation. It's a great way to visualize costs from the outset, analyzing the overall word count of a project, language pair, and translation memory leverage. By visualizing exactly where the money in the project is going (and how much it should cost in total), you’re empowered to find savings opportunities across your translation projects.
3. A Cloud TMS Provides Greater Visibility into the Translation Process
Without a Cloud TMS, translation is terribly opaque. Putting disparate parts together is frustrating and laborious, and getting a consistent brand voice within any particular localization (let alone all of them!) can be next to impossible.
Localization and project managers end up spending most of their time juggling emails, organizing spreadsheets, copy and pasting blocks of translated text, reformatting translations, uploading and deploying content, and many more tedious tasks.
With a Cloud TMS, your translation process becomes more transparent and more unified. The entire TMS is your single source of truth for every translation project. You’ll also get a complete view of individual project status down to the string level. You can know exactly where every piece of content and every assignment is located at any moment.
Smartling even provides our own unique Quality Confidence Score. The QCS is a prediction of translation quality outcomes in Smartling. It is a 1-100 score that indicates the likelihood that a translation is of “professional quality” if it were to be manually evaluated by a human linguist.
Overall, a cloud TMS provides your brand with a complete birds-eye view of the entire process, and the power to granularly analyze every single project.
4. A Cloud TMS Fosters Higher Translation Quality
With a Cloud TMS like Smartling, you gain tools that enhance your overall translation quality. Smartling has automated quality checks built right in to ensure that all published content is free from any errors or mistakes.
Quality Checks can even be configured to prevent translators from submitting their work without correcting any issues, and can be optimized to focus on specific elements: spelling, grammar, number consistency, and more.
Translators working within a cloud TMS also have direct access to a variety of linguistic assets, including Style Guides and Glossaries as well as your Translation Memory to ensure brand consistency and proper terminology throughout the translation.
As context is key in translation quality, Smartling provides linguists with Visual Context. Our platform captures a snapshot of the content the translator is working on -- whether that be a webpage, a mobile app, a video, a marketing email or any other form of content -- so that the translator will see how their work appears on the finished product.
5. A Cloud-Based Platform Means Globalized Freedom
The best perk of using a cloud-based translation management system is perhaps the most obvious: it’s cloud-based.
That means you and your entire team can work from anywhere in the world.
This globalized freedom is especially valuable in translation work. Translators are the heart of a successful localization campaign, transforming your content in a way that both maintains your brand style and tone, but effectively engagees a new audience.
With a cloud TMS, translators have the freedom to work within the platform from anywhere in the world. This means that your brand can tap into native speakers, cultural experts and even linguistic experts from nearly anywhere on earth.
Translating? Your brand needs a TMS
Tailoring your brand’s content with localization is essential if you want to succeed in markets other than your own. And to do it well, you need the right tools. Smartling is an industry-leading cloud-based translation management system that can supercharge your localization efforts. Interested? Let’s chat. Schedule a demo today!
