Localization automation: How to streamline global content

Localization is a necessary undertaking for any company looking to expand their business across the borders. However, it can often be time-consuming, costly, and prone to errors. Luckily, there’s something that can ease your work, and that’s localization automation. It can streamline localization, reducing costs, improving accuracy, and ensuring scalability. Our article aims to explore its importance, benefits, and tools involved in this process.

Why consider localization automation

In traditional localization, human translators and localization experts manage this process manually. This could work, but why not increase efficiency by automating repetitive tasks like translation, formatting, and quality assurance (QA)? This way, it’s easier to ensure consistent terminology, style, and formatting across different languages.

A global survey from Unbabel targeting private-sector global marketers across eight countries found that 41% have implemented a partially automated process, while 18% have fully automated their processes.

Now let’s talk money. By automating routine tasks, you can allocate resources more effectively, lower labor costs, and optimize your localization budget. Plus, by leveraging automation, it’s simpler to scale your business and introduce your products and services to new markets more quickly.

How to automate your localization

Automation integrates various technologies and workflows to optimize the translation and adaptation of content. Here are some tools you will most likely work with:

Translation Management Systems (TMS)

We could say this is the backbone of localization automation. This centralized platform is designed to manage, track, and automate the entire localization process, from translation to final delivery. It’s the meeting ground for project managers, translators, developers, and QA teams, where they all can collaborate.

One of the features that will be of most help to you is definitely translation memory, a database that stores previously translated segments. When new content is translated, the TMS automatically suggests matching or similar translations from the memory. Over time, you’ll see how this feature significantly speeds up the localization process.

This research paper highlights that the main driver for adopting Translation Memory (TM) is the pursuit of increased productivity. The findings show that using TM can boost productivity by anywhere from 10% to 70%.

TMS platforms also offer real-time visibility into the status of each localization task, so that project managers can monitor timelines. Consequently, it makes it easier for them to allocate resources efficiently, and address potential bottlenecks.

Machine Translation (MT) and Neural Machine Translation (NMT)

As opposed to human translation, machine translation converts text from one language to another using software algorithms. In one of our previous articles, we discussed how the process has advanced significantly in recent years with the development of neural machine translation, which uses deep learning techniques to improve translation accuracy.

The European Language Industry Survey reports that over 70% of independent language professionals are using machine translation to some extent, with half employing it only occasionally. After translation memory and terminology management, machine translation is now the third most widely adopted technology among independent language professionals.

Not to be seen as a replacement for human translation, MT can be used as the first step in the localization process. It can provide a draft translation that can later be post-edited by human translators. This speeds up the process significantly, especially for large volumes of content. You can train custom MT engines on your specific content, including product manuals or marketing copy, to improve the accuracy of translations tailored to your brand/industry.

Content Management System (CMS) integration

When working with a CMS, you can integrate localization automation to ensure that your that localized content is dynamically managed and updated as part of the overall content lifecycle. Automated systems can monitor a CMS for new or updated content. As soon as changes are detected, the system can trigger a localization workflow without requiring manual input.

Once the translations are complete, the CMS automatically publishes localized content, ensuring that updates to websites, apps, or digital platforms are reflected simultaneously across all supported languages. Some CMS platforms even allow content to be tagged for different regions, cultures, or languages.

Automated Quality Assurance (QA) tools

QA is an important aspect of localization; a mandatory step where you check that your translations are accurate, culturally appropriate, and free of errors. Automated QA tools help reduce the time and cost of manual reviews by identifying potential issues in the localized content.

Linguistic checks allow you to check for spelling, grammar, and syntax errors in translations, while functional checks look for things like for text truncation, incorrect display of dates, times, and currencies, or formatting issues caused by different language lengths.

Some QA tools can even flag content that may not be appropriate or relevant for the target market. Localization teams can set specific rules to flag inappropriate content such as idiomatic expressions or localized terms that may not be suitable for certain markets. Certain QA tools also offer compliance checks to ensure that translations comply with regional legal and regulatory standards.

In-context translation and collaboration tools

Alas, we have in-context translation tools that enable you to see how the translations will appear in the final product. This is especially useful for software and UI localization. Translators can view a live preview of how their translation will look within the application or webpage. This is great because is allows them to account for space limitations, UI constraints, and design elements.

There may be bumps along the way

There’s no doubt about it, localization automation offers so many benefits, but there are some challenges too. Automated systems, especially MT tools, often struggle with nuances, idiomatic expressions, and culturally specific content. To address this challenge, many businesses employ a hybrid approach where machine translation is used for the first pass, and human linguists review and fine-tune the output.

Localization automation often requires integrating multiple systems (such as the ones discussed above) and product development tools. You need to make sure that these systems work together smoothly. Each platform must be configured to communicate efficiently, detect updates in source content, and trigger appropriate localization workflows.

Another significant challenge in localization is maintaining terminology consistency and ensuring that translations adhere to brand voice across multiple languages. Translation memories, integrated into TMS platforms, help maintain consistency, but you need to manage and update these databases so that new terms and phrases are aligned with current branding and market-specific adaptations.

Without a doubt, localization automation can save costs in the long run by reducing reliance on manual processes. Nonetheless, for smaller companies, the initial investment in tools, platforms, and system integration can be significant. If this is your case, evaluate whether the potential savings and efficiency gains justify the upfront expenses.

Automate your localization with POEditor

POEditor is a localization automation platform and translation management system designed to streamline the translation process for software, websites, games, and mobile apps. It offers robust automation features that make it easy for businesses to manage multilingual content and collaborate with translators and developers.

You can take advantage of a collaborative environment where multiple users to work on the same project simultaneously, with real-time updates and notifications so that everyone stays on the same page. Project managers can assign different roles to users, controlling who can add, edit, or approve translations.

POEditor has a comprehensive API and supports multiple integrations that enable the automation of content extraction, translation, and updating processes. This is useful for your developers and content teams, who need to manage continuous localization for software, websites, or mobile applications.

Naturally, we incorporate translation memory and machine translation engines such as Google Translate, Azure AI Translator, and DeepL. To ensure that your translations meet set standards before they are finalized, you can use the built-in QA checks. These automated checks help you identify issues like missing translations, inconsistent use of terms, and untranslated strings.

Whether you are a small business or an enterprise, automating your localization with POEditor can greatly enhance your ability to deliver localized content quickly and effectively to new markets.