Localization is a booming industry (49.6bn USD in 2019), and there is a reason behind it. Localized content for different markets and audiences is the next step of personalization, an engagement driver for communication with your customer. Every single minute, an astonishing amount of information is created - in 2020, reportedly 2.5 quintillion bytes of data have been produced every single day.
With such a high number, it is evident that to get the attention of data consumers, localization becomes a tremendous competitive advantage in the flood of information, whether you want to hold your market share in your current markets or consider a foreign market expansion.
The more content you create, the bigger issue it is to localize the content, whether it is the user interface, localized data set insight, or a marketing copy for your campaigns.
And so, translation automation comes in to help content producers localize their content for specific audiences. Smart technologies such as the pioneer Google Translate or German DeepL translator API come in handy for many. However, translation and localization are different terms.
Even though Machine Translations can help you get closer to your customer, it was always a challenge to ensure that translations are aligned with the culture that the content is localized for and that the particular expression is translated correctly.
This is even more important with regulated industries such as medicine or law, where certified translations are required. And even if you are not within a regulated industry, still, there is so much management overhead that many consider content localization a real pain even when technology is a big helping hand.
We are fans of quality; thus - automated translations are not what we do. Automated translations are error-prone. You need to check the meaning, but also pronunciation, context, placeholders, and so on.
There is always quality assurance at play. It doesn't matter if you use our Free tier and enjoy our unique review system with your in-house team or utilize Autopilot features where human engagement is automated.
🔥 Managerial Inferno of Localization Management
- Based on our customer interviews, there are still so many teams who use spreadsheets in
XLSfiles and send translations back and forth by email, resulting in a waste of time and increased errors due to error-prone localization management workflow. - You will spend hours with every single translator to provide them with management support. From hiring through work to payroll.
- Increasing developer manhour costs no longer allow for inefficiencies, such as delegating localization management to people who shall develop your product instead.
- This list is infinite and can get you bored easily, so let's skip it for now.
☝️ How to tackle continuous localization? Ask your developer.
Do you know a book called "Ask Your Developer" by Jeff Lawson, founder of Twilio? It is an excellent read for everybody who seeks a major shift in productivity and efficiency.
This book did NOT inspire Localazy per se. Still, you can find many common beliefs in this book and better understand how Localazy can help you tackle continuous localization once and forever.
🤝 True Continuous Localization with Localazy
Imagine the day when you do not have to think about all of these issues, and you can focus on your agenda. Localazy is here to make this experience available. You can find many solutions for localization on the market, but guess what - there are roadblocks everywhere.
Our team consists of software developers, marketers, entrepreneurs. We are makers, and we have tried many solutions for content localization. So, while it may sound funny, it was easier for us to build a new localization platform to fulfill our needs.
Localazy's vision of continuous localization starts with freeing up hands for developers, but it continues: You can manage your whole workflow within a one-stop shop.
Localazy is for localization like ClickUp is for productivity, but easier to start with and utilize the full potential within day 0. (Sorry guys, we love you tho!). 💖
🚀 Introducing Localazy® Autopilot
Localazy is reportedly an excellent solution for developers to free up their hands, helping them focus on code, but localization does not stop here. The real fun for the whole team only begins.
Localazy offers services of the Continuous Localization Team which allows you to choose from:
- Virtual Reviewer
- Virtual Translator
- Professional Translations
All of these services will translate your apps for you, while you sleep. 💤
🕹️ Development features
Localazy Free and Localazy Professional already come with features unseen elsewhere for a fraction of the cost of other localization platforms on the market.
Many helpful features for developers are available in the Professional Tier: Release Tags, Format Conversions, and Connected Apps, all ready for agile development processes and aiming to keep your translation management even more clean and streamlined.
Localazy = Your Own Localization Team Within One Payment
👓 Quality & Granularity Management for increased ROI
- It is an expensive experiment to get your app translated by professional translators if you are only looking to get your feet wet in a new market. In some cases, many businesses decide pragmatically to use MT pre-translate, which stands for Machine Translation Pre-translate. In this process, machine translations are utilized to perform the very first iteration of language translation, enabling you to narrow the resources required to incorporate new languages.
- Once Machine Translation is performed, a product owner can decide to perform Post Editing of Machine Translation (MTPE) to tackle possible errors that emerged.
- The first iteration of the new language set can be then utilized and further improved within a PDCA cycle, for example, using professional translators or even market localization specialists.
- Increased granularity while keeping the management simple is a key to iterate your product language support faster.
🤖 Machine Pre-Translate
Localazy MT pre-translate utilizes many resources, from our own crowd-generated yet incredibly accurate translation memory Localazy ShareTM to other data sources such as DeepL, Amazon Translate, or Azure Translate.
✍️ Post Editing of Machine Translation
With the increased quality of Machine Translations, a discipline called "machine translation post-editing " (MTPE) made its debut as a significant bottleneck, tightly connected with the increased demand of the workforce.
With Localazy Autopilot, you can just set up your configuration for a particular language and get started.
⭐ Virtual Translator for cost efficiency
Quick and affordable human-assisted machine translation (HAMT): Selected languages are translated by a machine translation engine and then verified by a human translator to confirm that context, punctuation, and placeholders are preserved.
However, the translations might not be as accurate as those provided by professional translators.
🌟Virtual Reviewer for translation quality assurance
Once a phrase gets translated by a human or machine, there is always Quality Assurance in question. Translation review is a must, but it is also a pretty tedious, boring activity. With Localazy Virtual Translator, this is different as we handle this for you.
A human reviewer verifies the quality of submitted translations by checking the consistency of context, punctuation, and placeholders. Additionally, the reviewer may correct small mistakes or typos in the translations. Phrases are either accepted or rejected.
Set up your Virtual Reviewer, and our expert team will review your machine translations on a best-effort basis. If you are on Localazy Autopilot, you are all set for continuous delivery of new translations
💫 Professional Translations for best translation quality
Professional translations are definitely worth it, especially for your primary markets. Managing multiple languages always comes with multiplied management overhead. Localazy has many expert translators under the hood, and they will work for you without you having to hire, assess, and payroll them on your own.
Localazy will pick and hire professional translators to translate your app to the selected languages.
Localazy is well-rated by professional translators who are already familiar with modern CAT tools. Localazy is loved for the simple user interface and packed with all the essentials + some extra features to increase quality and productivity to keep your costs low & quality high.
💯 Continuous Localization with Localazy
As you can see, the true continuous localization with Localazy covers all of the many steps involved in localization management, with a single service - Localazy Autopilot®.
Enjoy your global market expansion for as low as $49 / month. You'll receive a full-blown localization platform - from various i18n integrations through translation management system to your very own outsourced localization team - real, experienced people to make your product globally available and locally ready.
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://localazy.com/blog/true-continuous-localization-localazy