This is a concept that can be easily explained with a metaphor.
Imagine you’re cooking dinner, and once you’ve served it on the table, you need to wash the pots and clean up the surfaces. Whether you do this before or after eating, it makes the meal less enjoyable – either you eat it cold or you have no time to relax afterwards. However, if you wash the pots while you’re cooking dinner, once you serve it, you don’t have to worry about anything else other than enjoying it. It’s the same with software localization. If you wait until the development process has finished to start the localization one, you’ll inevitably incur delays in releases for different languages, as every language won’t take the same time to translate. This can lead to all sorts of issues, such as customer disengagement for the unpublished languages or even opportunity loss if you’re looking to enter new markets.
By integrating the localization process into the development one, you ensure that changes to the source content made by developers are sent for translation automatically without having to adhere to established translation sprints or frequencies every week or month.
So how can you do this?
Localization files often reside alongside the source code in version-control systems like Git. This setup allows developers and translators to work together efficiently, ensuring that both the application code and its localized versions stay synchronized. By using a translation management system (TMS) connected to a developer-tool repository like Git, any changes made to the source code will trigger the new content to be sent to translation, automatically exported, and imported back into the repository to keep all versions up-to-date in all languages. Thanks to this process, the level of manual work decreases and the end-to-end localization process speeds up.
As an added bonus, if your developers can produce code that is world-ready (i.e. also known as internationalization, the process that involves preparing a software product for localization by separating language-specific elements from the source code), a lot of time can also be saved down the line when localizing the code in the different languages. Moreover, if you use a tool that enables dynamic previews, the localization process can be done in full context of the software itself.
By implementing a continuous localization strategy, your localization processes will automatically become more agile. But this is just 50% of what’s required to improve agility – the other 50% comes with being equipped with the right tools.
Even if the plan is set out and the strategy is well-devised, localization agility cannot happen if it isn’t underpinned by the right technology. A Translation Management System with good integrations to a wide range of tools involved in the content-creation process, from content repositories like Git or Jira to terminology management, QA tools, and project-management tools among others will significantly save time. Brian Lutz, Knowledge Architect at SAP, highlighted the importance of good connectivity “We have products where we need to deliver translations on a daily basis, and we actually get source language updates twice a day and are expected to deliver language translations twice a day. And that’s for many languages at the same time. So we need to have a tight integration between the actual source repositories and the translation environment.” Without this integration, it would be almost impossible to deliver translations twice a day purely based on the amount of time it would take to manually carry out the tasks that the integration between the repository and the TMS automates.
We need to have a tight integration between the actual source repositories and the translation environment if we’re going to successfully deliver translations on a regular basis, sometimes even twice a day.”
Brian Lutz
Knowledge Architect
These are the standard tools used in most mature localization programs, but to further enhance agility, it’s necessary to think outside the box and search for other tools out there that can further speed up the process. In software localization, one of the most prominent challenges encountered by most companies is that bottlenecks are often created due to the large number of queries stemming from a lack of context in translatable content.
Since this requires the development team to get involved in answering these queries, the overall process becomes considerably inefficient for both the developers and linguists. While many companies choose to find workaround ways to make this process more efficient, in reality, and once again, proper efficiency can only come through the deployment of the right technology. There are localization tools available that provide context and dynamic previews for linguists, which allow them to translate the software in context and all but eliminate the need to file queries to developers for that purpose, allowing everyone to focus on their area of expertise and, more importantly, reducing costly delays.
Manual tasks and offline communication are two of the most common reasons for delays in localization, so finding ways to eliminate or reduce them should be a top priority, especially for software companies due to the fast-paced frequency of their releases and updates. For offline communication, the solution is to find a technology that provides a centralized communication platform. This solves the problem of any queries or notifications to stakeholders who may be working in different time zones or email communication that can become cumbersome and inefficient. By centralizing communication within a single platform, stakeholders can easily collaborate, share updates, and address queries in real time, regardless of their geographical location or time zone. This not only makes the process more agile but also reduces delays and improves overall efficiency in the localization workflow.
Automation is the answer to speed up your entire localization process. A higher level of automation in a localization program or strategy indicates a superior level of technological maturity, which in turn means that companies are more efficient in the localization of their global content, driving higher speed, quality, and cost-efficiency.
The process of becoming more agile through automation starts with assessing all the manual tasks that are part of your localization process and then identifying those that can be automated and those that can’t. Examples of tasks that can (and should be) automated include:
- Import and export of translatable files from the content repository to the TMS
- Extraction rules
- Workflow step transitions and assignments
- Use of neural machine translation
- Use of translation memory
However, even if a task can be automated, it doesn’t mean that it should be. For example, if localized content for a certain country requires a higher level of attention or is especially focused on quality, it needs a dedicated workflow design to include steps for the relevant SMEs on a needs basis. With software localization involving so many teams from different departments, automated workflows are a must, as no time is lost in notifying (or receiving notice of) completed workflow steps.
Nevertheless, speed is a top priority in the software industry, and according to Lutz, the idea most enterprises in this sector have is to achieve that level by maximizing automation: “We have a very low-touch, no-touch project management. And our goal is really to be as no-touch as possible in that regard. This is the only way that we can really keep up with the speed that our internal customers are expecting. And this is, of course, only possible because of the APIs.”
Achieving a complete no-touch process is of course subject to the level of technological maturity a company has. Therefore, assessing the current level of maturity and finding how to increase it and climb up the maturity ladder is a necessary first step to finding solutions that speed up your localization processes and still maintain your desired levels of quality and cost-efficiency.
Automation is one of the more basic features of technological maturity, but with support and assessment from your technology providers, reaching no-touch processes should no longer be considered a utopian concept but rather a feasible one that software companies should be aiming for.
