BLOGS
How to Ensure Quality Localized Content and Avoid These Common Traps
June 15, 2023
When you are looking to expand the reach of your global company, it's vital that you ensure the quality of your localized content.
Quality localizations are necessary for providing a unified brand identity across your multiple markets. They allow your international customers to better connect with your company and its products, increasing your sales and brand loyalty.
How can you create systems that support quality localized content?
One approach that supports this goal is to use structured content. This is a way of storing and editing content so that it is treated as if it were data.
When used correctly, structured content can streamline your localization process and make quality assurance easier and quicker.
Here is how you can use the right tools, standards, and conventions with localized structured content…
Why localization quality is key for global companies
Quality assurance is only one part of the localization process. Other parts include translation, desktop publishing, culturally appropriate image selection, and more.
High quality localized content reduces the chance of misunderstandings from people in your international markets. It also helps maintain consistency across multiple language variants, helping ensure users have a unified experience of your company no matter which language they speak.
How do you define quality in localized content?
In our recent Rubric Team Talk roundtable discussion, Rubric's Head of IT, Dominic Spurling, explained:
"From a technical perspective, we measure quality in terms of how many anomalies are picked up by exception reporting tools. If we're doing updates frequently and they go smoothly with no version issues, then that is an indicator of good quality."
Other measures of quality are more subjective and specific to your company's goals and content guidelines.
Standards, tools and conventions used in structured content
Part of creating a robust localization process is to use the right standards, tools, and conventions. There are many options, though there are some common standards used by many tools.
Dominic says:
"XML DITA is a standard that gets talked about a lot in the context of structured content. It has open source and proprietary tools for data content creation, publishing engines and data content management systems, required for maintaining and managing content over time."
Other standards include:
- JSON — A lightweight data interchange format for structured data.
- Markdown — A markup language that can easily converted into other formats.
- CSS — A style sheet language used to describe the presentation of structured content, but not the content itself.
You also need the right authoring tools to create these data formats.
A common tool used by many of our clients at Rubric is Madcap Flare
Dominic says:
"Madcap Flare is a proprietary tool that provides both authoring and publishing capabilities, but it still requires technical expertise to set up and manage. It's always good to get technical expertise to set up a nice and clean pipeline managing Flare content."
5 common traps to avoid when localizing structured content
Localizing structured content in a streamlined way can be a tricky process. There are various pitfalls we often see teams encountering when using structured content for multilingual content.
Here are 5 common traps for you to avoid:
1. Not structuring your content
It probably seems obvious, but structured content should be stored in a structured way.
Most of us are very familiar with unstructured content. Tools like Microsoft Office or Google Documents prioritize the appearance of content over its structure. To get the most benefit from structured content, you need to detach the content from its appearance.
2. Not providing enough context
When you are localizing your content, it's a good idea to provide as much context as possible so the localization team can understand the purpose and intent behind each piece of content.
Rebecca Metcalf, Rubric's Global Content Business Analyst, says:
"Our best practice guideline is that snippets and variables ideally should only be things that shouldn't be translated in any language. A product name, for instance, or a company name."
3. Overuse or over-architecting of content
It's easy to get carried away when designing a structured content architecture. This might involve creating overly elaborate conditions for certain types of snippets or variables.
Over-architected content can lead to confusion down the line. It can also make your structured content implementation less robust to changes. One way to reduce the chance of this happening is to work with a localization provider that understands structured content.
4. Misunderstanding of snippets and variables
While snippets and variables are core to using structured content, there is a right way and a wrong way to use them.
Rebecca explains:
"Snippets should be at sentence level, ideally. If your tools are used well, it's possible to get the maximum benefit from them while not compromising on the linguistic quality."
5. Not properly defining roles and responsibilities
One foundation of structured content is that people are only responsible for the relevant content. For example, designers only interact with design-level data (such as CSS style sheets) and translators only interact with content that should be translated.
Make sure that everybody understands which content is applicable to their job.
How to design a robust quality assurance process for global content
Designing a robust localization process supported by structured content is an iterative process. You won't get it perfect the first time around.
It's important to design quality assurance into the process from the beginning.
Work with your localization provider to set up your structured content tools and processes so that quality content in all your markets is assured. Set clear quality assurance steps and communicate the quality guidelines to the relevant stakeholders.
Automation is an increasingly important aspect of a localization process. At Rubric, for example, we run content through various automation tools to check localization quality without adding unnecessary extra manual steps.
With the right approach, you can make quality structured content localization your company's "business as usual."