Any company with a website can be considered a global brand. The Internet all but dissolved geographic borders for business and commerce. And with the rise of mobile devices, customers from all over the world can now find companies outside of the country they live in, with the click of a few buttons in the palm of their hand. Consequently, brands are increasingly doing business beyond their home market.
Translation and localization have remained largely manual processes, requiring time, resources and budget that many organizations don’t have. As a result, many businesses have neglected to include these practices in their global marketing efforts. As for those that have, most are still operating under the outdated assumption that standard translation of English-language content is ‘good enough’ to engage multilingual audiences. This passive tactic is no longer sufficient – especially when you consider that 95% of the world’s consumers and 80% of the world’s purchasing power live outside of the U.S. Tweet This!
Word-for-word translations alone, especially when machine translation tools are used, are often unnatural, inaccurate and error-prone. Worst of all, they lack context. Companies that wish to succeed on a global scale must now move beyond standard translation to create engaging native brand experiences that resonate in any language, all cultures, and every market.
What constitutes a native brand experience?
At the heart of every native brand experience is content localized and personalized for the end customer. Native brand experiences entail communicating in local dialects and considering regional idiosyncrasies; taking into account points of cultural sensitivity, and taking an appropriate and respectful approach to all communications; and knowing target audiences’ customs, traditions, and preferences. In short, native brand experiences deliver localized content and personalized experiences to each and every customer, regardless of where they reside.
Smartling’s Translation Management Technology Enables Ambitious Brands to Better Engage Global Customers
In a global economy, translation management technology must be thought of as part of an organization’s existing marketing technology stack. While the time, cost and complexity traditionally associated with translation and localization processes made their omission understandable in the past, today, companies no longer have an excuse for failing to engage global customers in a way that adequately reflects how they live, act and speak.
Smartling’s Global Fluency Platform (GFP) provides translation management technology that eliminates as much as 90 percent of the manual processes associated with translation and localization. With Smartling, organizations can continue to leverage professional human translators for the highest possible quality while automating the non-linguistic parts of the process. Content in need of translation is automatically detected, captured and flagged for human transaction. Professional translators then work through a contextual interface to provide translated and localized content that is stored in the cloud and eventually delivered back to its designated endpoints.
Smartling’s GFP is redefining the way brands create, distribute and manage global content. Traditional pain points associated with manual translation and localization processes, such as managing hundreds of spreadsheets of content in need of translation and partaking in endless back and forth with translators via email, are eliminated. And companies can reach more customers with native brand experiences with greater speed, and at a fraction of the cost, fueling global growth.
Here are just some of the benefits Smartling’s GFP provides to companies wishing to translate and localize their websites, mobile apps or other digital content:
- Speed – Rather than spending endless time and resources manually tracking and delivering translations, Smartling automatically detects content changes as they happen. And the company’s Global Delivery Network enables brands to fully internationalize existing websites or apps in as little as three weeks, with no re-coding required.
- Cost – Faster time to market through automated translation processes equates to cost savings. Smartling’s translation memory functionality also helps speed translations, cut costs and maintain brand consistency by storing previously translated content. Users can then repurpose saved translations when identical content inevitably pops up again, thus eliminating the need to retranslate entire pages any time even a small portion of content is changed.
- Quality – Not only does the Smartling GFP enable users to leverage human translators for the highest quality global content possible, but it provides language service providers with an “in context” view of their translations. Because they’re able to see translations in context, instead of in a cumbersome and overwhelming spreadsheet or text file with no visuals, translators can have more confidence in the accuracy and quality of the multilingual content they produce. Smartling also provides a host of other global brand management tools that boost quality, including translation memory, fuzzy matching, and glossary and style guides.
- Control – Smartling’s centralized project management platform, robust custom workflow engine and issue management tools give companies complete visibility and control over all of their translation projects.
- Choice – Most vendors in this space require companies to use their translators. Smartling enables its customers to pick the translation vendors of their choice – regardless of whether those resources are their own preferred vendors or Smartling partners. Smartling also has a plugin-architecture that can integrate with third-party human and machine translation services.
The folks at Smartling did a demo with our Agency site and provided us a look:
Smartling’s Translation Connector Integrates with Adobe Experience Manager
The Smartling Translation Connector is easily installed with minimal developer support and quickly extends customers’ Experience Manager systems with automated access to submit and manage content for translation by chosen translation providers. Smartling’s Translation Connector supports content submissions and integrates with the Human Translation API available in Experience Manager 6.1 and 6.2.
Smartling Integrates with IBM Watson Language Translator
Smartling has also released an integration that enables global brands to seamlessly use Smartling products and services with the IBM Watson Language Translator machine translation service. Companies using the new Smartling plug-in have more flexibility and control of the translation supply chain and access to pioneering machine translation technology that can help them cost-effectively enter new international markets without sacrificing quality.
Smartling’s technology is changing the way global content is created, consumed and managed. Hundreds of organizations are using Smartling to reach more customers with localized websites, mobile apps and games, and other digital content.
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