Are your translation projects getting smaller and smaller? Do you re-use select chunks of content on your website and social media, as well as in press releases and other documentation? Does this content have to be updated regularly and “tweaked” for each use case?
Many of our translation clients have core content that is repeatedly used for a single purpose but needs to be modified over and over to reflect a new target audience or time-bound purpose. This applies to organizations that find themselves re-using content across multiple channels in different formats, as well as those that frequently update older publications of the same format to create new versions.
Large, single-purpose translation projects with long timelines are dinosaurs in a modern era. Companies digitize more content, publish across multiple channels, and release or update products and communications more frequently. All of this results in high volumes of micro-projects that include only the small chunks of text needed to customize what is otherwise boilerplate.
These small translation tasks need to be converted rapidly and frequently. If your organization is translating these small chunks of text one by one as standalone projects, you may be accruing unnecessary costs. There is a more cost-effective way, rest assured.
A Content Revolution Is Upon Us
We are in the midst of a content revolution, with every company – regardless of industry – having to produce some form of media. At the same time, the economy is more globalized. The translation is no longer an afterthought but rather a key ingredient in go-to-market strategies.
LEARN MORE: LanguageLine Can Handle Translation Projects of Any Size
Our clients are increasingly less likely to create a large suite of English-language published artifacts for longer-term use, which they then bundle and send to a language-services provider (LSP) for translation. Instead, translation is often happening before or parallel to publication; in fact, the published artifact may be the very last thing created in any language. The focus is now squarely on the content.
In many cases, the sequence has shifted from “Content Creation -> Publication -> Translation -> Re-Publication” to “Content Creation -> Translation -> Publication.”
All organizations must now take a hard look at how they’re organizing, storing, and managing content. If the content is being stored and organized across a library of individual documents, it’s time to re-think things. And if your organization is looking back through old files to find the passage they need, you should know there’s a better way.
What Can Be Done to Better Manage Content?
Now that organizing translation projects around large and infrequent bundles of content no longer fit the modern world, many organizations face the challenge of managing smaller translation projects and their related costs.
We recommend that these organizations first implement a content management system (CMS) or similar repository to help streamline the process for authoring, storing, repurposing content into various formats for different purposes.
LEARN MORE: Your Content Is Translated, But Is It Localized?
To facilitate the translation of this content, LanguageLine offers connectors and integrations for a wide variety of commercially available content management systems and development services to integrate with homegrown systems. These connectors remove many of the inefficiencies related to processing translation work as individual projects and documents by allowing us to more efficiently and cost-effectively manage small translation projects on a continuous basis.
If anything described above is reminiscent of your challenge with “small translation projects,” the most modern solution is to consolidate content in a CMS, partner with an LSP that can integrate with that environment, and then use that connection to facilitate translation as your content is updated and generated and before it is propagated across your channels.
This saves on the costly overhead related to manually bundling, importing, exporting, uploading, organizing, and tracking translation projects. These are the things that have historically justified the “minimum charges” that turn small translation projects into costly ones.
