These days, globalization is nothing new, and development firms must adjust to the growing need for localizing their products. Today, every client wants to receive a high-performing, locally-adapted product on time, which presents a problem for developers.
Delivering localized goods more quickly while continuing the development process is one approach to keep clients satisfied with your business. However, because localization differs from the software development process, agile practices present several difficulties and dangers. Let’s examine continuous localization and the ideal strategies for streamlining the procedure inside your business.
What is Continuous Localization?
Any plan for conducting business internationally must include localization. It entails changing a product, piece of information, or service to conform to a target market’s language, cultural, and legal demands. Traditional localization methods have, however, come with several drawbacks, such as slow turnaround times, high prices, and subpar quality. By speeding the localization process and offering a more flexible and effective method, continuous localization, an emerging concept, aims to overcome these issues.
Content generation, translation, review, and delivery are all steps in the traditional localization process, which is sequential and linear. Before going on to the next step, each one must be finished, which can cause long turnaround times and postpone product delivery. Additionally, conventional localization is frequently expensive since it needs a lot of staff to oversee the translation and review procedures.
Conversely, continuous localization takes an ongoing, iterative approach to localization. It entails using technology and automation to speed up the process and incorporating localization into the product development cycle. The conventional obstacles between product development and localization are eliminated with continuous localization, allowing localization to be incorporated into the product development cycle from the start.
The Benefits of Continuous Localization
- Shortening turnaround times is one of the main advantages of continuous localization. Continuous localization ensures that content gets translated and approved as soon as it is developed by incorporating it into the product development cycle. As a result, product delivery delays can be minimized by releasing translated material concurrently with the source content.
- Utilizing automation and technology, continuous localization also aids in cost reduction. Using translation memory and machine translation tools can speed up and streamline the translation process while enhancing consistency and quality. Continuous localization may save a lot of money by eliminating human resource requirements by automating the translation and review process.
- The enhancement of quality is a crucial advantage of ongoing localization. Continuous localization ensures that localization problems are found and resolved early in the development cycle by incorporating them into the product development cycle. This enables concerns about language correctness, cultural appropriateness, and legal compliance to be resolved before the product’s distribution, resulting in localized material of greater quality.
However, putting continuous localization into practice calls for cultural and mental change. It calls for a dedication to incorporating localization into creating a product and a readiness to accept automation and technology. Additionally, it calls for cooperation between the teams responsible for localization and product development and a common appreciation of the significance of localization to the latter’s success.
Main Advantages of Continuous Localization
Although continuous localization requires more time and resource commitment than the traditional model, there are several significant advantages to take into account:
- Customer satisfaction: thanks to continuous localization, consumers receive the product considerably more quickly and can immediately utilize the full capabilities of the application.
- Smoother development process: Continuous localization refers to the ongoing localization process, which allows changing specific strings immediately if necessary, saving the developer from having to review everything again at the end.
- Process transparency: Continuous localization frequently entails the usage of a particular tool where developers, translators, managers, and other team members collaborate.
Challenges to be aware of while implementing continuous localization
Choosing the Right Level of Consciousness
The belief that localization must keep up with code and content contributors at all costs is one of the major errors. The reality, however, couldn’t be further from that. We advise you to carefully consider what is necessary to satisfy consumer expectations before retooling for continuous localization.
Continuous Localization Implementation with a Traditional Mindset
Continuous localization isn’t about modernizing your TMS and business procedures to streamline manual software string translation operations. It involves rethinking and re-architecting systems to handle the high-velocity, ongoing need for software, documentation, support, and marketing material translation. You can’t accomplish that with a conventional perspective hindered by code and content repositories that don’t communicate with one another. Continuous localization should not be forced into a waterfall model. The worst thing you can do is try to go quicker by employing more traditional, slower methods.
Supporting Teams Working on Continuous Development That Aren’t World-Ready
As engineering teams compete for financing and resources throughout a product’s lifecycle, the flaws in these models continue to force them to question what should be prioritized to enable proper internationalization. But in order for a company to ever claim true success in continuous localization, buy-in from these teams is precisely what has to occur. When non-globalization-compliant code continues appearing, it’s a no-go. This covers the standards for third-party components and recently acquired teams regarding globalization compliance.
Context Conundrum Solution
Getting material in quick bursts with no prior context is usually to help the linguist. Suppose your functional QA team isn’t ready to test translated releases and upgrades. In that case, the high-velocity process fails to deliver an excellent worldwide customer experience. This occurs when the feature development rate outpaces the localization testing capacity to keep up. Once more, it would help if you struck a balance between the worldwide customer experience you provide and velocity, turnaround times, and localizing each and every drop.
Wrapping Up
Continuous localization methods have faced several difficulties, such as protracted turnaround times, exorbitant prices, and subpar quality. By speeding the localization process and offering a more flexible and effective method, continuous localization, an emerging concept, aims to overcome these issues. Continuous localization may help companies cut costs, boost quality, and shorten time to market by incorporating it into the product development cycle and utilizing automation and technology. But to achieve continuous localization, teams working on product development and localization must work together and undergo a mentality and cultural change.
Continuous localization may require more money and effort than conventional methods, but the results will be considerably better. Even if you encounter some difficulties, the outcome will be worthwhile. See it as a long-term investment when striving to enhance the user experience steadily.
