A key challenge for the global marketeer is getting the balance between producing content centrally while ensuring it is fully localised for each market. And one of the best ways to achieve this is to work in partnership with your local markets. They know and understand the brand at a local level. Their input is vital. But how do you get them on side and prepare them with everything they need to give you the invaluable feedback you need to produce content that works for their market?
Here at Comtec, we’ve been supporting a wide range of clients across different industries in developing a fast and efficient feedback process with their colleagues. In this post, we share some of the lessons we’ve learned along the way. The tips are taken from our FREE downloadable guide, Delivering effective multilingual marketing campaigns, which is crammed full of practical advice to help you streamline the translation process and get better results from your marketing.
The practical suggestions that follow will help you put the expertise and enthusiasm of your local colleagues to good use, develop mutually beneficial ways of working, and help you get great results from your marketing content in every language.
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Recruit local market champions
Identify a trusted champion in each market who can advise your translators, review translated content and manage additional local market reviewers where needed. Look for people with a good understanding of sales or marketing, knowledge of your brand and style guidelines, and experience of reviewing translations.
Involve them in gathering feedback to help you ensure localised messaging remains impactful. Getting their input early in the process reduces the number of revisions required and speeds up translation sign off, helping you to meet deadlines and control costs.
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Ask for input
Take the time to understand the needs of your local market colleagues and give them plenty of chance to share ideas and feedback. Start by finding out what they like and don’t like about existing content and use this information to establish their expectations. Document your findings in a localisation brief that outlines the style and tone of voice for each market. Involving trusted members of your local team in producing this document can help to ensure future translations are friction-free!
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Encourage collaboration
Create an easy-to-access digital space where your local market champions feel comfortable sharing their insights and local market knowledge.
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Establish clear guidelines
Set out what you expect from your local market reviewers, so they understand the translation process, their role in it, and any limitations. You can do this together to strengthen your collaboration. For some guidance on what a strong translation process looks like, take a look at our recent blog Process Makes Perfect: how to deliver quality translations for your clients.
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Appreciate your colleagues
Find ways to recognise your local colleagues’ contribution from the start. Getting their input early on will help you meet deadlines, maximise your budget and benefit from higher-quality translations.
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Be consistent
Involve your local market experts in the production of style guides, glossaries and review guidelines to help your translators achieve consistency across multiple marketing campaigns.
Style guides
The information you include in your local style guides will help your translators understand your brand, use tone of voice and develop a consistent style. A strong style guide helps your translators to deliver on-message translations first time, every time.
Glossaries
Your glossaries should include technical terminology, industry and company-specific terms, common greetings, calls to action and more. Translations that are produced using glossaries traditionally need fewer revisions.
Review guidelines
These useful guidelines empower your local market experts to manage the review process and provide effective, consistent and constructive feedback, without the risk of diluting the brand. Their feedback can also be used to update translation memory software and to improve future translations.
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Develop a clear translation and review process
Outline your translation process and define roles and responsibilities. Make sure your local market champions understand how you manage projects, and that they’re familiar with the platforms you use.
Ask them to test your style guide, glossaries and even the review process itself on sample translations for your first project. Starting each new project with a kick-off phone or video call with your local market review team, project manager and translation team gives everyone the chance to review the process, check they have the right supporting documentation and know who to direct queries to.
Engage with your local market champions and reviewers regularly to share feedback and help them feel involved. It’ll help them deliver accurate, authentic and culturally acceptable translations that win over your audiences and keep your reputation intact! There are lots of relevant insights in our webinar Engaging local markets in the translation process – a 10 min watch!
How can we help?
This information, and much more, can be found in our FREE downloadable guide – Delivering effective multilingual marketing campaigns. It’s crammed full of practical tips to help you collaborate effectively with both your local markets and your translation partner. Have you downloaded your copy?
For advice and help with translating your content in over 200 languages, call us on +44 (0)1926 335681 or email info@comtectranslations.com.