Six Ways to Localize Multimedia Content for Your Business

Is your content culturally relevant? Find out why you should localize multimedia content — it’s important for your brand message delivery.

Localize Multimedia Content

Photo by Nathan Dumlao on Unsplash

 

Content localization is the process of translating, transforming, and revising content that you have created or prepared for your target market to ensure that it is broadly and culturally relevant, understandable, and acceptable to the new market you are trying to enter. This includes adapting or reconciling the translation of the content to convey your brand’s intended message in an appropriate tone, style, and/or overall concept. We offer you six ways to localize multimedia content for your business.

 

Self-localization

Not a great idea. In most cases, the customer, performing his own translation, uses the wrong vocabulary, even if his level of language proficiency is decent since only professionals who translate various documents every day can translate and localize this or that content with high quality.

 

Machine localization

Machine localization, despite its availability, is not the best way to translate and localize into another language. It also has a number of downsides:

  • Errors in the translation of fixed expressions, and complex sentences.
  • Inability to recognize the context, figurative meaning.
  • Errors in the translation of persistent phrases and expressions.
  • Inability to translate the entire volume without the words left.
  • The translation is simply necessary in the correction: this applies both to incorrect endings, and to the search for synonyms for a number of words.

It turns out that automated translation can leave entire chunks of text unprocessed, forcing a person to re-send the text for translation or use the services of another online translator.

 

Certified translation services

Certified translation services are one of the most obvious ways to localize – thousands of such offers are immediately generated upon Google’s request. It’s plus is that they work with trusted translators and editors, conclude a contract, and guarantee quality. On the other hand, such organizations have a rather high price tag, and even if you need “just two words to correct”, it can cost a pretty penny. In any case, certified Dallas translation services from professionals are almost always a guarantee of adequate translation: everyone uses the services of native editors and there are specialists who work with specific topics.

 

Freelancers

Working with freelancers is a lottery. You may be lucky – and the first translator will turn out to be a punctual professional, or not. An important caveat: when choosing a freelancer, pay attention to whether he had experience in localization. Otherwise, problems may arise: the text will not fit into the layout or will not correspond to the context, and then both he and you will be buried under endless edits.

 

Localization platforms

If you want to optimize and speed up your website translation process as much as possible, technology will come to your aid. Everything here is more or less automated: the customer adds the text on which the translators and editors are working, and the final version is automatically loaded into the site layout (if it is not specific, such as Japanese or Arabic). All fragments are stored in one place and are remembered in the Translation Memory so as not to translate the same thing several times. Here you can also load the context for phrases in the original language and glossaries that will unify the translation. But the most important thing is that the work is transparent: the customer, translator, editor, and developer can track the work, comment, and make edits in real-time.

 

Other translation bureaus

Most likely, if I ask you what a translation agency is, you will say that it is a company that has many translators in a huge number of languages. In fact, this is not entirely true, because the range of services of some companies has long gone beyond the scope of translation of documentation. A translation bureau is a service company that provides assistance in language translations, as well as other related issues in the preparation of documents overseas. Should I go there to localize multimedia content?

 

Conclusion

We live in a digital age, an era of constant and rapid growth in the volume of information. The share of multimedia content in this volume is large and continues to grow in all regions of the world. The popularity of multimedia products of various formats is associated with their ability to significantly simplify the perception of information due to the comprehensive impact on human perception systems.