Transcreation at scale: managing localization across multiple markets
Localizing campaigns and communications for global audiences can be a daunting task – especially when working across multiple markets and large volumes of content.
Overcoming the challenges of transcreating at scale requires a careful combination of planning, defined guidelines, effective project management, powerful tools and key local insights.
Getting it right means globally consistent content that is both true to your brand voice and locally relevant to your target audiences. Getting it wrong can mean unforeseen costs, timely delays and the potential for reputational risk.
Here we explore how to ensure speed, quality and consistency when transcreating at scale.
Plan and prioritize
It may sound obvious, but having a clear transcreation strategy in place can save headaches in the long run. Here are some key considerations when it comes to transcreation planning.
· Identify priority markets: prioritizing the markets you are more confident and familiar with means you can still launch in key regions if you need more time to focus on new or more challenging markets.
· Stagger language variants: staggering language variants until you have an approved ‘base’ version that language (e.g. Spanish for Spain) means linguists working on subsequent language variants (e.g. Spanish for Latin America) already have a core set of approved terms and phrases to work from, boosting speed and consistency across all variants.
· Plan by content types: as different types of content require different translation specialisms, lead-in times and linguistic considerations, planning your workload and publication schedule around different content requirements avoids unexpected delays.
Define clear guidelines
Maintaining consistency and tone of voice is one of the biggest challenges when transcreating across multiple markets. The starting point of any global localization project should be to establish clear linguistic guidelines, tailored to each market, so writers and checkers – no matter which language they are working in – have a clear set of rules for maintaining consistency and adherence to brand voice.
· Localized glossary: this key document sets out brand-approved translations of key terms, phrases, tools, features and slogans. It is a living document, constantly updated as new products and campaigns are developed. Integrating this with your online translation management system open means you can build an automatic term base for each market, further speeding up the transcreation workflow and ensuring consistency.
· Localized style guide: this document establishes the agreed linguistic rules for a given market, covering usage, grammar, punctuation and style for all content produced. It also provides local considerations for adapting the brand tone of voice, ensuring localized content effectively resonates with target audiences and accounts for any cultural nuances.
· Market-specific rules and regulations: as many markets are bound by specific rules and regulations regarding how content and campaigns are localized, clearly identifying and formalizing these into a set of guidelines will ensure all content is legally accepted.
Centralize your project management
Working across multiple time zones, accommodating for different alphabets and linguistic requirements, maintaining quality control across multiple suppliers: managing translation workflows across multiple international markets comes with a set of unique challenges.
Centralizing your project management – such as via a specialist transcreation agency – is the simplest and most cost-effective way of approaching any transcreation at scale project.
Specialist agencies not only have trusted and reliable systems and workflows – that they can adapt to your needs – but have direct access to the best linguistic talent, all vetted to deliver the highest quality content.
Use a reliable translation management system
Transcreating at scale across multiple markets requires a reliable, powerful translation management system (TMS).
As well as increasing speed and efficiency through automated process, a TMS can provide a host of features for maintaining quality and consistency across all markets.
Here are some of the main benefits of using a TMS for large-scale transcreation.
It provides one centralized, easily accessible workspace for writers, checkers and project managers, making it easier to manage multiple jobs and suppliers across multiple markets.
It enables a range of automated processes to speed up repetitive tasks, which saves valuable time and resource when dealing with large volumes of content.
It offers computer-assisted tools to maintain quality and consistency across markets, such as a translation memory, which draws upon past approved translations and suggests matches, localized term bases and automatic QA checks.
It supports enhanced collaboration and communication, which can be crucial when working across global teams.
Harness the power of AI and machine translation
Lastly, no transcreation at scale workflow is complete without some form of AI or machine-learning integration.
Involving human-in-the-loop AI in the transcreation workflow, where human linguists edit and check machine-powered translations, can greatly speed up the localization process. This is especially the case when regularly localizing similar types of content, as it provides the opportunity to train your bespoke machine learning model.
However, as with all forays into AI-powered transcreation, human input is crucial to maintaining quality and cultural relevance.
How Mother Tongue Can Help
Mother Tongue offers a range of solutions for managing transcreation projects at scale, from workflow planning and management, to advice on selecting the most suitable TMS, to machine learning translation services and machine learning optimization.
We also work with a global network of expert linguists, who can combine language expertise with key cultural insights.
Get in touch to see how we can support you to optimize your transcreation workflow.