How to Easily Automate Your Localization Efforts

While many global companies have shifted away from manually translating content via spreadsheets and files to localize their content, some are still underutilizing a key translation method that could help easily scale their localization efforts — localization automation.

When effectively utilized, a localization automation platform will make your entire localization process faster and easier. In many cases, localization automation has made the entire technical deployment process a seamless one for all your multilingual websites and apps. Properly and effectively leveraging localization automation requires understanding how the process works, so that you can use it to optimize your team’s specific localization efforts.

To help you get a better understanding of localization automation, here’s an overview of two main types of automation that companies are using to automate their global translation efforts, and the benefits of each.

Sync New Translations, Automatically

As your company marketing and messaging evolves, you need those evolutions to be quickly and effectively reflected across all your localized websites. To do this easily, you can use a Content Management System (CMS) for all of your web content.

With a CMS, you can link many localization automation solutions simply by using a plugin, which will automate the entire localization process for you. This way, as soon as you add new source content to your CMS, the localization system recognizes that new translations are needed, and automatically launches a new localization project with your translation team. Similarly, as soon as translations are approved, they are automatically published back to your CMS for deployment to your web infrastructure. If you are not ready for full automation, you can transfer new source files from your CMS into your localization automation platform, and then create an upload-download workflow to get the translated content back on your site.

Enable In-Browser Translations

Now, you no longer need to expand your infrastructure and resources to support the technical hosting requirements of sites in new languages. Instead, you can use a localization automation platform to easily serve up translated content directly into the user’s browser.

All you need to do is insert a simple line of Javascript into your website (like you would track Google Analytics data). This makes deployment of your localized websites significantly easier because most of the technical implementation details are automatically handled by the platform. With this method, multilingual website expansion becomes a viable strategy for companies of all sizes.

Explore Additional Features & Resources

The value of a localization automation solution is multidimensional. In every deployment use case, an automation platform will simplify the process of managing content for translation by hosting your source content in a format easily accessed and utilized by your translation team, providing the supporting tools to translators, tracking translation status by language, and flagging approved translated content for publication. And as you explore the wide range of translation technology available to you, remember that, beyond just localization automation, today’s translation management platforms are equipped with various features and translation tools to help make your localization projects faster and easier.

Explore the Full #TranslationMustKnows Series

This post is part of the #translationmustknows series, built to equip everyone in your localization process – from developers to localization managers – with the knowledge and resources necessary for achieving translation and localization success.

Explore the full #translationmustknows series to catch up on other posts and learn everything you need to know for translation success:

• 6 Things to Keep In Mind When Selecting Content to Localize
• 2 Simple Ways to Calculate Your Translation Budget
• How to Easily Automate Your Localization Efforts
• 3 Steps to Successfully Maintain Your Global Websites
• 3 Ways to Build an International URL Structure
• 5 Resources for Translating & Localizing Your Content

Achieve Website Translation Success

Website localization is a complex task. That's why we've put together a guide that breaks down each key step of your software localization process from start to finish. Download the guide for action items and best practices for website and app localization, and an overview of the results that effective localization can drive for your business. Whether you’re a digital marketer responsible for all the facets of your company’s website or a webmaster responsible for the infrastructure and processes behind the scenes, this guide will walk you through all the critical steps of localizing your content.