in Localization Tips

This week’s blog entry on Simply CSOFT makes a general case for how some of the standard service offerings of a LSP can be beneficial when localizing global brands. Whether you’re familiar with the localization industry or not, this piece should provide some food for thought, especially when considering current global trends.

We live in an increasingly interconnected and globalized world. With so many different avenues for advertising and so many diverse audiences to capture, maintaining a strong and consistent brand image and message has become progressively more difficult. As the game has changed, businesses looking to achieve international marketing success should consider adapting their strategies to meet these new challenges.

It all begins with understanding international markets, or trusting a company that does, such as a localization provider. A company that specializes in localization can help you make brand become global brands, because that is namely what they do: adapt products to be culturally and linguistically appropriate to specific target locales. By localizing global brands, CSOFT helps companies of all kinds gain access into diverse markets and increase global market share. Beyond that, however, localization companies can offer you a lot more to make your brand message stick. Here’s how:

Terminology Management: Localizing Global Brands
If there’s one thing a good localization provider should be able to offer, it is terminology management. What does terminology management allow you to do? Well, for starters, it saves you a lot of time and money. But most importantly, terminology management keeps your terminology consistent, not just in one language, but across any language that you may be operating in or localizing for. Consequently, for the do-it-yourself crowd, TermWiki provides an excellent platform for multilingual terminology management. Consistent terminology leads to a more achievable consistent brand messaging – a crucial ingredient for maintaining that universal, unified quality.

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Industry-specific Knowledge
Localization providers also have experience specific to certain industries. What this means is that the people working on your translation projects have come across a lot of this terminology before and in many cases are even experts in the fields for which they are translating. This knowledge and experience delivers results that are both consistent to your image and accurately relevant to your specific industry.

Translation Memory
Saves you time and money – yes, great, but what relevance does it have to branding? Translation memory enables you to leverage previously translated content to be used again in the occurrence of an exact match in a new translation project. This means that you receive consistently translated material each and every time you have a new project. As a result, your brand image is consistently represented in every piece of translation work completed.

Quality Assurance
Consistency also comes from quality. To ensure that your brand image is consistently presented throughout all translated content, you want to choose a localization provider with high quality standards and quality assurance. International certifications like ISO 9001 provide guidelines for localization companies and hold them to strict regulations when it comes to translation quality and standards. Also, be sure to ask potential localization providers whether they implement any QA checkpoints into their internal workflow, and if so, for the details of these checkpoints.

Transcreation and Localizing Global Brands
Now we’re getting to the good stuff. As one of the more valuable resources to draw from a localization company, transcreation is the process of deconstructing a source text, finding the core concept, and then putting it back together in localized terms to best address the target audience. It is a process typically conducted with less technical documentation, such as marketing collateral, and is subsequently a viable solution to taking your brand message global.

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By opting for transcreation over ordinary translation, companies are able to utilize their localization provider’s intimate knowledge of particular markets and regions around the world, incorporating the nuances of the culture and language specific to those locations. It can be a somewhat lengthier process than regular translation, but the outcome is a product that fits in the context of the particular locale for which it is meant and addresses both linguistic and cultural peculiarities.

Developing and maintaining a strong brand image and message takes time and a lot of work, but for those who are serious about engaging international markets, the price is well worth it. Even if your company lacks the resources to adapt its brand image to other markets, that doesn’t mean you can’t access them. Find a localization provider to take on these tasks for you. In doing so, you will be able to take advantage of such processes as transcreation, which goes beyond simply recreating your brand message in another language and instead determines the best way to present your message in that language for the given region, while others, such as terminology management and translation memory, maintain consistency across all of your marketing collateral. By leveraging the experience and resources of a localization provider, you can achieve a brand image that is both strong and global.

That’s not to say that all localization providers are equipped to handle requests of this nature. But for one that is, you need look no further than CSOFT  for localizing global brands (shameless plug, yes – but then it is our blog after all :)).

If you’re interested in learning more about globalization, localization and translation, check out our website here.

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