5 Great Tools for International Marketing Localization

Every skilled professional has tools that they need for their trade: this applies to the localization and translation industry as well. Without the right tools, translation can be exponentially more difficult than it should be.

With this in mind, here are five great tools and processes used to facilitate the localization and translation of your international marketing materials.

Smartling

Smartling is one of the best available cloud-based tools for translation management. Its platform allows users to automate workflows, manage their brand in different global markets and reduce the amount of coding that is required to create localized websites. Since your translation information will be stored in the cloud, you can access it from anywhere. Smartling also integrates with tools that are often used to design and create marketing materials, like InDesign and Word, which makes it an especially great choice for these kinds of projects.

The Agile Process

Agile is a type of workflow that is frequently used for projects that are complex and have many different moving parts – which is typical for most localization work. The basic philosophy of agile is that instead of working through the process completing steps one after the other like the traditional “waterfall” method, many tasks are accomplished simultaneously. The completion of these tasks happens over a period of time known as a burst or sprint.

Agile is great for localizing marketing materials because it is so flexible. A major component of agile is getting feedback from users and changing the work process based on this feedback. Since user feedback and marketing go hand-in-hand, agile often makes sense for marketing localization projects.

Joomla

Joomla is an online content management system (CMS) that is excellent for companies looking to translate their marketing materials because the platform supports many different localization and translation tools. There are numerous extensions and plugins for Joomla that have been created by developers with the goal of helping people with their translation needs. Because Joomla has such a large following, it is relatively easy to learn more about how to translate marketing materials using this platform.

Sitecore

Like Joomla, Sitecore is a CMS that is used to create and manage content. However, Sitecore is different because it is focused on improving customer experience. Using Sitecore, you can integrate several different aspects of your marketing approach, from email newsletters to website content. This makes Sitecore a solid choice for the localization of websites and other important marketing materials – since customer experience is a key consideration to keep in mind when you are working on these types of materials. Sitecore also interfaces with some popular translation tools (including Smartling), which means it can seamlessly blend into your existing work process for translating marketing materials.

Translation memory

Translation memory refers to the idea of storing segments of text that have already been translated, to optimize the translation process. Most of the top translation memory tools and platforms include some native translation memory component.

For example, if your jewelry company regularly localizes marketing materials, you can probably identify some descriptive words related to your products that you use repeatedly: words that tell people about the size, number of karats, or type of stone. By storing these repeated terms and phrases in a term base and translation memory database (respectively), it becomes much more accurate, consistent, and lower cost to use them while localizing similar marketing materials.

Marketing content needs to be translated successfully if you want your unique selling points to come through clearly in your communications to prospects. If you explore and properly use these tools, it may be much easier for you to localize your materials for an international audience.