Your content authoring tool has a significant impact on your ability to manage content at scale.
If you have multiple sets of content, for different products or platforms for example, it can be hard to keep track of all your content.
Maintaining separate versions of your content for maintenance, version control, and management can be costly, time-consuming and confusing. It is also hard to maintain consistency across all your different content versions.
If you want your company to thrive in the global marketplace, it's increasingly necessary to publish multilingual content across different platforms. But creating and managing this content can be a daunting task.
Many content teams in global companies use Madcap Flare to streamline their content creation process.
Why is Flare such a suitable tool for managing the source files for your multilingual content?
Here’s how Madcap Flare helps you manage your content at scale…
What is Madcap Flare?
Flare is a highly popular content management software from Madcap. It helps you to create a range of content types from online help to user manuals.
Flare is easy to use and comes with all the features you might need to create and manage professional content. It allows you to import, manage, collaborate, and publish content all within the same software.
If you are a content creator, you know how important it is to have the right authoring tools. A good tool will make your life easy and efficient.
The problem with many authoring tools is that they are not designed to handle the type of scale that is necessary for true global content. You end up having to create complex, clunky workarounds.
Flare is one of the few tools that is inherently good at handling the complex content of global companies.
Why managing multilingual content is challenging
Multilingual content is challenging for companies like yours for a variety of reasons.
First, multi-platform, translated content can be expensive to produce regularly. When your company serves multiple international markets, any inefficiencies in your content creation and localization processes are multiplied. The engineering costs associated with managing your global content can also be high.
Second, it can be difficult to keep track of all your content. Without a platform like Flare, you may need to maintain separate versions of your content for each platform, content type, and even language. This maintenance and management can be time-consuming and confusing.
Finally, it's hard to maintain consistency across all your different content versions. With so much content to manage, you can end up with discrepancies between different versions of the same content. This can lead to confusion for users and could even damage your company's reputation.
Because of such challenges, many companies struggle to keep up with the demand for multilingual content. This often leads to frustration and confusion among customers, who can’t access the information they need in their native languages.
4 impressive ways Madcap Flare helps manage your content
Thankfully, the right tools can make your life a lot easier and help you overcome the challenges of creating and maintaining multilingual content at scale.
In the right hands, Madcap Flare can be one of those tools. It has a few features and benefits that can ease the process of creating and managing content.
Here are 4 impressive ways that Flare helps streamline your localization process:
1. Single source of truth
Consistency is a vital part of a well-designed content workflow. When you maintain consistency across the different aspects of your content, you can avoid costly rework and ensure your translated content is accurate.
When you create a Flare project, each piece of content is only stored in a single location. This makes it easier for you to track changes and updates to that content. Content for different languages can be managed in parallel if you use Lingo, as explained below.
With Flare, you can author your content once and reuse it (or "snippets" from it). Using conditional text, you can then use the same source for multiple outputs. These might be different types of content or different versions of a product.
2. Structured content
In Flare, structured content is what enables single sourcing.
With structured content, your content follows a defined schema. This makes it more machine readable, which allows automated publishing to multiple channels (usually print and online doc). There is also the option to define variants of the output which include or exclude specfic content, such as manuals for different product variants.
3. Translate the project file
When you work with translations in Flare, you have a choice of two different approaches: translate the output files or translate the project file.
Translating your Flare project file is usually the best approach. It maintains that single source of truth that is so important for keeping content consistency at scale.
All these functionalities and more combine to mean that you can more easily manage your multilingual content when you translate the project file.
4. Integration with translation tools
When you are working with translated content, it helps enormously if your authoring tool integrates with your translation tools.
Madcap provides their own translation tool: Madcap Lingo. This integrates well with Flare.
However, even if you are using another translation tool, it's easy to integrate them with Flare. Whatever tool you choose, the most important factor is that you practice process optimization.
How to get started with multilingual Madcap Flare
Managing your global content at scale can be a daunting task, especially if you haven't done it consistently before.
Madcap Flare can be a highly useful tool for helping you to streamline your content workflow. But you first need to decide how you will manage the tool and integrate it into your content creation process.
Madcap recommends that there are 3 ways to get started with Madcap Flare for translation. These are:
- DIY approach — Here, you try to do everything for yourself. You either contract a translator or try to use machine translation tools. People who try the DIY approach usually find that it results in low-quality translations and they spend a lot of time struggling to manage their content.
- Outsourcing translation only — Here, you manage the Flare projects yourself and only use a translation provider for the translations themselves. If you have a lot of experience managing multilingual Flare projects, this can work. However people often find that the engineering and management work is more than they expect.
- Full service translation partner — Here, you work with a translation provider that has experience and expertise in managing Flare projects. For example, at Rubric we often work with our clients in this way. Together, we help them make savings and improve the efficiency of their localization process overall by optimizing their use of Flare.
Whatever approach you choose, Madcap Flare is certainly a useful too when you are working with multilingual content.
For a worked example of one of our Flare integrations, check out our previous blog article.