Localization

Imagine this: you decide to expand your very successful and popular mobile cooking app to other markets across the globe. You want to reach a wider audience and maximize your return on investment. You start by contacting translators and localization experts to ensure your app’s content is accessible to audiences from different countries. But is that enough?

As Nimdzi’s co-founder Renato Beninatto likes to say, there have only ever been three disruptive innovations in the language industry: e-mail, Translation memory software, Machine translation, and Google Translate in particular. But is there anything else? An idea so innovative that it could transform and reshape our industry?

The translation technology landscape is continually evolving, and it’s quite impressive to see just how many tools are out there right now. Yet, given the sheer number of available platforms, it can be quite daunting and confusing to shop for a solution, and you may be worrying whether you have to spend a fortune to get what you need. The good news is that with a wide variety of tools, comes a wide variety of options — for all budget levels.

When it comes to managing localization from the client side, the tendency is to rely on two main pillars: language support and translation technology. The standard approach in the industry is to assign these key areas to two separate parties, usually outside the organization.

As you begin to expand your target audience to include speakers of languages other than just English, you may quickly find the road ahead of you is much rockier than you had originally anticipated. But don’t fret: creating impactful, lasting multilingual content is a long game, which requires developing the right strategy.

It’s already been six years now since Google revealed that Google Translate processes 146 billion words a day — three times more than what all the professional translators in the world combined can do in a month. That was 2016 and things haven’t really slowed down in the machine translation (MT) universe since.

Deep down, every business person in the world knows it: localizing a company’s content and products can boost revenue — enormously. But how can globalization experts persuade the C-suite — and other stakeholders — to greenlight a localization program? In other words, how do you pitch a localization program? Answer: you create a business case.

The language services industry once again proved to be impervious to crises and continued to grow in 2021. It now also has its first billion dollar company. Long-time industry leader TransPerfect just revealed that the company reached USD 1.1 billion in revenue in 2021.

Calculating exactly how much it will cost to localize your digital content can be complicated and complex, as there’s no quick and dirty formula for estimating localization costs with any degree of precision.

Impressed by the level of inadequacy shared around the world these days, we have taken it upon ourselves to make our very own collection of myths and beliefs about the translation and localization industry.