Brands targeting an international market of multilingual users require language services. It’s not just about translating website copy. It covers all touchpoints, from digital content and product information to digital marketing and customer support.

And it involves every aspect of operations, from regulatory compliance and patent filing to multimedia content, training materials, and international digital marketing.

The challenge is to achieve on-brand accuracy and consistency across all touchpoints of a customer or user’s journey.

One Brand, Many Markets

Global brands that operate in multiple international markets undertake a variety of activities. Many of these activities involve content and documentation that must be localized and culturally adapted for each local market. Some examples include:

• Website and other digital content and assets
• Software and mobile apps
• Multimedia content
• Digital Marketing
• E-learning and training materials
• Help desk, knowledge bases, and customer support
• Voice assistants and chatbots
• Regulatory compliance materials
• Patent filings, litigation, and legal documents
• Financial reports and documents
• Technical manuals and documentation
• Clinical trial, healthcare, and life sciences documentation

All these various pieces must work together to create a consistent, accurate brand journey across multiple languages.

Supporting the Global Business Journey

The global business journey includes filing an international patent, developing, and internationalizing a product suitable for users worldwide, localizing your go-to-market strategy, and rolling out multilingual customer support, including chatbots, FAQs, and knowledge bases.

To support global growth, it’s crucial to consider the whole journey, not just the individual parts of translation and cultural adaptation.

Whether you work with one language service provider (LSP) or multiple vendors or are looking to appoint an LSP as a strategic partner to support your language programs, there are defined stages in the global business journey:

Protect your IP

Entering an international market requires regulatory compliance to set up a local office or launch your products. You must also file patents and be prepared for possible litigation to protect your IP assets.

You’ll need a language services provider that can provide not only accurate translations of legal documents but one that’s also experienced in complying with different requirements from various jurisdictions. 

Build a Team of Linguistic Talent

Localization projects that involve multiple languages in many foreign markets require a global workforce. The more content types you need to translate, the more complex the localization requirements are. You need an international talent team of linguists, reviewers, and subject matter experts.

Talent management is important to ensure predictable performance and high-quality output with agility and scale. Large LSPs will manage a talent workforce, including everything from sourcing and onboarding to quality checking and talent retention.

Communicate with Global Audiences – Translation, Localization, Transcreation, Interpreting

With a global localization team, you can get started and translate your digital content and other documents into your target languages. This may involve working with various internal stakeholders, prioritizing language pairs, and preparing your content for translation and localization. You also need to agree with your LSP on the scope of work, workflows, targets, quality levels, and deadlines.

Machine Translation (MT) and Language Technology: To increase content volumes and efficiency, a lot of content can be supported by language technology, specifically MT, depending on content type and desired quality output. Some content can go through MT and go straight to publish, for example, knowledge base materials that do not require high levels of editing and polishing.

For high-impact content such as corporate marketing materials, MT with post-editing and possibly 100% human translation may be preferred. Welocalize also uses AI-driven technologies for translation, such as natural language processing (NLP), to build training data sets for conversational AI applications, such as chatbots and voice assistants.

Quality Validation, Localization Engineering, Testing

The localization process doesn’t end when the translation is complete. You must engineer and test the translated content for the real world. You need representatives from your target market to test your website, apps, product information, and other content. This is called linguistic and functional testing, where you check if the translation is correct and the content is culturally appropriate.

Testing also ensures that no formatting or layout problems have occurred in the translation process – German text can be 40% longer than English, which can cause problems in user interfaces!

Welocalize conducts rigid user testing through our U.S., India, and Romania testing labs. Our global QA and testing teams detect and resolve possible usability issues, such as software bugs, system crashes, code errors, and broken links.

Go to Market: Performance-Led Digital Marketing

Launching products or services in new international markets includes driving performance-led digital marketing campaigns. You need to optimize the performance of content across all types of digital marketing activities, including paid search, search engine optimization (SEO), organic and paid social media, and conversion optimization.

At its basic level, even if your website is localized and optimized for users all over the world, they will each have different ways of searching online – international SEO keyword research will help better understand how your target markets are looking for products like yours.

Work with Welocalize

Whether it’s website or software localization, linguistic or functional testing, compliance materials, technical documentation, conversational AI, or international marketing, we can support your global business journey from end to end. Contact us to learn more.