Content Reuse Strategies and Maximizing Your Translation Value

The use of manuals, inserts, guides and supporting documentation content is important in all industries, and especially the healthcare, medical device, and pharmaceutical fields. If collateral pieces are not created accurately, users may fail to understand how to interface properly with the product or equipment, causing some serious dangers to patients and staff members.

One of the principles for maximizing the success of localization in the medical field without investing a huge amount of extra time or money is content reuse. Content reuse strategies can help companies effectively localize important content used by patients and staff members.

Effective Localization through Content Reuse

Content reuse can improve the localization process by reducing the amount of content to translate, allowing the translation team to produce results faster. By reusing content that has already been translated with Computer Aided Translation tools (aka CAT tools), such as Translation Memory, they can localize repetitive and similar content more easily. And this typically leads to much lower localization costs.

Companies pursuing localization will also find that content reuse strategies allow translators to make updates faster when they’re called upon. The more they can reuse a particular piece of localization content, the easier it will be for translators to learn about the appropriate context for that content. For example, after seeing a particular marketing strategy applied on a any given product, a similar usage on future products becomes easier to identify and express with clarity.

Reusing content is especially important in light of the huge popularity of mobile devices, even in a highly regulated industry like life sciences and healthcare. This is because in today’s world of print media, the web, plus smartphones and tablets, content is reused in exponentially more places than it was in the past.

Customer Experience Governs All

Customer experience is the one important concept that must be kept in mind during every decision you make about your localization and content reuse. Customer experience means getting the customer what they want, when they want it, and how they want it, in order to meet their goals and satisfy their needs. The Harvard Business Review goes into further detail about the importance of making customers happy, writing that companies who can master the art of a successful customer experience have higher revenue, higher employee satisfaction, and less customer churn.

How is customer experience related to content reuse strategies in localization? To provide the best possible experience for customers, content needs to be reused in the right place at the right time. In the medical industry, this idea can be taken one step further: customer experience and patient experience are both paramount. If a healthcare user has an insufficient understanding of localized content, it can lead to harm for patients, such as if a doctor or nurse interprets instructions for a piece of medical equipment the wrong way, or if dosage instructions for a drug are mis-translated. Content reuse allows for established, correct content to appear again and again, rather than chances being taken on having that same content re-translated unnecessarily, thereby reducing the potential for problematic events like these.

Content reuse can be extremely beneficial for localization, especially in a field like healthcare where product collateral is critical for safety. If you want to minimize the amount of time and resources you have to invest into your content localization while improving both purchaser and end user experience, make sure that reuse is a part of your content localization strategy.