We all know, translating your business content for diversified foreign markets is essential to build a multilingual global market identity. However, how you write your original content has a huge impact on the translator’s ability to comprehend the content and deal with the translations more effectively.
Considering the fact that translation is an expensive part of localization, you have to keep things simpler from the beginning. It will cut down the overall cost and avoid other types of inconvenience. Here in this article, we’ll have a look at some important factors that you must keep in mind while translating a piece of content from the intention of translating it later.
Keep The Localization in Mind from The Beginning
Localization is not something that comes your way out of the blue. When you start your business keeping localization in mind from the start, it helps you design your content strategy accordingly. While writing your content, be mindful that it will be translated into other languages and cultures, so keep your message as simplified as possible. When you have your language part oversimplified, you can avoid linguistic complications later in translations. It is about internationalizing your source content in a way that is ready for localization. Such content is easier to understand by translators, and the whole document translation process will be less time-consuming.
Write Well Organized and Clear Content
Make sure to write your source content with clarity and simplicity. It significantly reduces the chances of contextual errors and other mistakes in your translations. You must have structured your source content properly and used more brand-specific terminologies in it. It becomes easier for the translator to identify the subject and keep the translations aligned with the actual context of the brand message. So, make sure your content doesn’t have any vagueness and ambiguity because it can lead to inaccurate and out-of-context translations.
Keep Your Brand Voice Consistent
If you want your translation to remain consistent, you must first keep your source content’s voice consistent. Your content must follow the unique brand voice and the tone should be unchanged for all documents. It will allow you to maintain your brand’s unique identity in foreign markets. So, avoid writing in your individual tones and styles and follow the strict brand styling guidelines. Moreover, if you are writing content for global markets, you better avoid using too much humor, idioms, and cultural references. It will make it more difficult for translators to translate such content and localize it for totally different cultures and societies. You can use a professional localization platform to manage your content resources from one place and keep your translation process agile.
The Right Use of Graphics
Of course, if you are writing content for the websites, it will have graphics and images as well. With your textual content, you also have to keep your images ready to be localized. The most cost-effective way is to avoid using any sort of textual content on your images. It will save your localization cost because you don’t have to localize the images every time you are translating a piece of content. Moreover, it involves manual uploading and removing images, which is again a time-consuming process.
When you add text to your images, it gets very complicated to adjust the translated text on images because of variance in language length.
Always Provide Context to All Information
When it comes to content creation and translations, context is the most important thing. Being a source content creator, it is important to add comments to your content to provide translators with sufficient information to understand its context. For instance, you have written “place the order now” on the website content. How would your translator figure out that it is a button, not a banner text? That’s why it is important to mention through proper commenting.
You can add comments to the Word doc or create a separate spreadsheet providing all the required information that translators should know to fully grasp the context of the content.
Provide Reference Material
You should provide your translators with resources and reference material to make him/her understand your requirements fully. It should contain enough information about the tone, style, and context of the source content. It will help translators keep the translations aligned with your requirements. You are also less likely to send your translations back to translators again and again for edits. So, make your reference material ready to avoid any inconvenience, and prevent frequent mistakes.
Using a project management platform, you can easily manage translation glossaries, style guidelines, and reference materials.
Summing Up!
The overall quality and consistency of your translations very much depend on the source content organization and structuring. Making your content ready to be localized later is essential to save the precious time of your translation team. It will speed up your localization process, and there will be fewer chances of mistakes occurring due to a lack of contextual information and misunderstood requirements.
You can also get help from professional localization tools to help you achieve agile and continuous localization of your content for global markets.