Not translation. Localization, please.
More than translating content, we need to make it meaningful in different contexts.
Translation is a well known process, used by many in the industry. Google Translate, my best friend, can vouch for me.
It turns out that when I started to work here at Gympass, I came across a scenario that I had not experienced anywhere else: a global company needing to adapt its product to different markets and communicating in more than 10 languages.
As soon as I settled into my chair for the first time, I started to understand the company’s existing translation process. And to my surprise, there was no one — OMG!
Meet the old #Translations channel
So what I found at first was a Slack channel where anyone could ask for translations. Pretty crazy, right? Oh, there was more. If you didn’t have anyone fluent in German willing to help you, well, Google Translate stepped in to help.
To make a long story short, whether the translation was being made by a random colleague or Google, there just wasn’t any context attached to that job. Translations were quite literal: an isolated phrase went and another isolated phrase came back. In addition to that missing context, hardly anyone interpreted the cultural context or used the company’s voice to translate that bit of copy.
This was what was happening:
Another problem that happened quite frequently was that the colleague helping out often went ahead and “solved” other “problems” seen in other parts of the flow being translated. An absolute chaos!
The end of an empire
Jokes aside, taking down this Slack channel was my first goal when it came to translation.
To start this revolution, two actions were taken:
- The creation of a board where task requests would come in, complete with sheets containing screenshots showing translators the context of what they were translating, plus a concise summary of the task at hand — for more context.
- The selection of some colleagues at Gympass who would become an informal team of internal translators. There would be fixed deadlines and their managers would be aware of this side hustle, so it wouldn’t just be a favor and they would have proper time to be able to dedicate to these tasks.
The new workflow looked like this:
Well, it still wasn’t the ideal world, but we had at least managed to overthrow #Translations. With that, the path was opened so that we could start to refine the translations, that is, to think about Localization proper.
How to scale a product globally
I already mentioned a speech by Marcos Bagno in another article, but I’d like to reinforce here that language is alive and flexible. There will always be important nuances depending on the destination and the user to whom we are talking.
In the case of a global company, this only becomes scalable if the product adapts to different regional cultures and is, in fact, incorporated into people’s lives.
For this to happen, it must be like a chameleon, transforming dynamically to adapt to different realities in an organic way, taking into account local legislation and cultural differences.
When thinking about language, this is where Localization comes in. Within the strategy of adapting the content of a product or service to different cultures, it is essential to recognize patterns and adapt approaches.
Here at Gympass, the change in mindset was very important. Failing to think about translating and locating the content made / makes all the difference to the teams’ routine.
Over time, we proved this discipline’s value and stopped being just a UX Writing team. Today we are the UX Writing and Localization team. Fancy!
We also hired a localization platform and trained the translators with our content guides, glossary, etc. Thus, all translations are done based on the personality of the company and localized according to the languages requested.
Evolution of the workflow:
The coolest thing is that in addition to working with a specialized platform, we already have a translation memory and can use machine learning, that is, the machine already helps us to localize a variety of content based on what has already been translated before.
The writing team always checks the translations, but in general, the results are absolutely professional.
Now, some data
In one year working with the platform I mentioned above, there have been approximately 350 localization projects completed. Just imagine doing all of this internally and by email (or on a Slack channel!). Now add to that experience, people translating the texts with their own voice, and not that of the company, and, still, trying to solve the problems of their respective areas in the product content … Just crazy!
A brief mention about machine translation and translation memory: of all the words we have already translated and reviewed, 18% was reused in other translations, increasing delivery quality, product consistency and reducing costs.
Speaking of costs, the savings as of today are around 13%. The expectation in the medium / long term is approximately 40%. The greater the volume of translations performed on the platform, the faster we will achieve this level of savings. Pretty cool, right?
It is almost unbelievable that this all started in a Slack group!
