Why Data and Technology is Essential For a Better Translation Outcome
There’s a better way to ensure a quality experience for your customers.
Your global audience has some expectations.
Consumers today expect a 360-degree experience that spans all channels and seamlessly goes from digital to brick and mortar. This can be challenging to do in one language, and more so when you’re translating brand-owned digital content across multiple languages.
Seventy-nine percent of the global audience accessing digital content does not speak English, according to Common Sense Advisory.
That’s why Smartling created an integration with Adobe Experience Manager to extend our best-in-class translation management tools with the premier content management system. By centralizing all translation activity to Smartling’s cloud-based system, Adobe Experience Manager customers are able to easily scale the customer experience into any language.
Adobe knows it’s important to provide consumers with an authentic, engaging experience, and so do we.
Provide high-quality content in your customers’ native languages for an authentic experience
Global brands are all striving to provide high quality content in their customers’ native languages. As part of that effort, they are constantly working to improve and optimize translation quality. Of course, the more efficient a brand can be, the more content they can translate, which means serving better customer experiences at scale.
Seventy-five percent of consumers agree that when deciding between two similar products, they are more likely to choose the product in a language they understand.
Today, without data and technology, quality management can be a huge undertaking. Contrary to publishing content in your source language, you can’t measure the quality of the translated content you are publishing on your own.
This creates friction between the resources you have available and providing quality experiences to your customers.
You hire in-market linguists or borrow resources from within the company. At the end of the day, all you know is that you’ve dedicated a number of employees to manage something that you yourself (as the manager) don’t understand — literally!
After that, you’re checking and rechecking content only after it is approved and published. Worse, it means pulling and redoing translated content only after a native user recognizes an error — not a good experience for your customer.
That means quality management is both time consuming and uncertain. This begs the question, is there a better way?
After implementing Smartling, Hootsuite was able to reduce its time spent on translation by 95 percent, to just two hours per week.
Improve translation outcomes for a seamless connection with your customer
The existing methods used to measure translation quality have been reactive, but that doesn’t mean there’s not a better way. We believe that in today’s world, quality measurement should be continuous, automated, and in real time.
At Smartling, we manage this with a feature we call our Quality Confidence Score. With this algorithm, we are able to analyze over 100 points of data and predict the likelihood of a translation being of high quality.
This includes data on how much translated content is being reused, whether or not your translation adhered to your glossary, and whether key quality drivers like visual context were used during the translation.
Based on the resulting analysis, users can see in real time the likelihood of a translation being of high quality. This means better quality, faster time to publication, and ultimately a better customer experience.
Using Smartling, Pinterest was able to streamline its translation process significantly, resulting in an 85 percent improvement in time to market.
Our integration with Adobe Experience Manager means that you don’t have to leave a familiar platform to deploy content in any language. This gives you all of the power of our technology and data within your CMS of choice.
How brands are using technology and data to improve their bottom line
High-quality translations are optimized for reuse. The more you can reuse your translations (called translation memory leverage), the more cost-efficient you can be.
Furthermore, we collect data at every touchpoint in the translation process. We’ve analyzed all of this data and built an algorithm so that after every translation job, we automatically surface recommendations as to how you can improve translation outcomes in the long term.
By providing data-based quality analysis, tracking, and analytics, our customers can see what parts of their process are effective, and what are not. A more cost and resource-effective process means the ability to translate more content at scale and test new markets with agility.
Conclusion
The digital age has introduced a challenge and an opportunity. The challenge is to keep up with all of the different content mediums. The opportunity is that if you can keep up with all the demands of delivering on the customer experience without adding headcount, there is the potential to increase sales and profitability.
At Smartling, we use cloud technology to automate translations, and we collect and analyze data to realize what’s most important to your translation goals — impactful quality under a controlled cost.
Learn more about how Smartling and Adobe can move your business forward.