Three keys to unlock a smooth multilingual publishing process

In today's age of digital and omnichannel content, having a well-thought-out multilingual publishing strategy is critical to the success of any global business. Companies across industries face similar challenges, including how to manage multiple content libraries, work with one or more language service providers (LSPs), ensure on-time releases, and deal with stakeholders in up to 180 markets.

Content is stored in silos—and often partially shared—among multiple standard departments and distribution channels, including marketing, website management, technical publishing, HR, training, legal and patent management, and clinical trials and claims, among others. Professional fields. Over time, the amount of content and the number of target languages has increased rapidly.

So, how to effectively deal with these challenges?

Here are three key strategies that have been proven many times to significantly reduce manual operations and duplication of effort, shortening time to market, while controlling costs and ensuring content quality:

1. Establish a unified corporate translation process

First, the various stakeholders need to identify the main, critical areas of multilingual content production. Document the key process steps for each area and outline the processes that have common characteristics. Next, examine the changes required in each area and add them as sub-processes to ensure that the unique needs of each area can be met.

The establishment of this unified process helps eliminate communication barriers between departments, makes cross-departmental collaboration more efficient and consistent, and ensures that each link can be completed with high quality and efficiency.

2. Automate non-qualified tasks

Once key processes are documented, identify process steps that can be automated. A typical translation process often contains 20 to 25 manual steps, including those performed by external language service providers.

Through automation with modern translation management technologies, the entire workflow can be reduced to just 5 steps, only a few of which require human input. In this way, completion time can be reduced from weeks or even days to hours or even minutes. If machine translation (MT) is considered as a suitable process component, the required steps can be even fewer.

Steps suitable for automation include: content extraction, transfer of content between content repositories and language resources, reuse of previous translations, quote analysis, supplier assignment, and content reintegration.

3. Centralized management of language assets

Manually managing language assets, including terminology glossaries, brand and style guides, and translation memories, is challenging and risky. To ensure the success of translation work, linguists must always work with the latest versions, which means that every time there is a small change in the source language, it must be updated, quality checked, and approved in each language version.

While you may technically own the language assets, in most cases your language service provider controls those assets. By using translation management software to manage your language assets, you not only significantly improve the scalability of your process, but also increase your flexibility in selecting suppliers and increase your control over costs.

in conclusion

By applying the three strategies above, you'll be able to reduce the complexity of internal project management, accelerate time to market, control costs, and increase the scalability of your processes. For rapidly expanding global organizations, especially when accuracy is critical and time is of the essence, these factors can be the difference between success and failure in international markets.

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