Workflow
Welcome to Part 2 of the Buyer Series! Thank you for stopping by.
In this second installment, I talk about the importance of thinking through the localization workflow with an emphasis on coordinating tasks with colleagues. Your localization program will comprise a series of interconnected services, tools, and people that all need to work together to avoid snags.
Large-scale localization programs are often run through client portals or on translation management systems (TMSs): cloud-based, multi-stakeholder platforms. These tools provide a host of features that facilitate localization processes. Different roles and levels of permissions open the door to considerable production activity.
The thing is, these platforms cannot handle every single task. Delivering a brochure designed in InDesign? You'll want to do the final QA check of your translation... in InDesign, not a TMS, to make sure the layout is precisely the way you want it now that it is populated with the target language text.
Thus, knowing where to complete a task is as important as knowing who is responsible for doing it. It's these kinds of details that can go unnoticed without proper guidance from your LSP.
What's a light-weight exercise to help everyone on the team visualize the process, you ask? Flowcharts! I know, I know. Not sexy. But I recommend it anyway once your localization program takes shape. Here's the next chapter in Jill's journey to hire an LSP.
Rolling Up Her Sleeves
Jill 'commutes' to her desk located in her small home office.
She is settling into her new part-time role as localization manager (LM) for Company X. It's not her main gig, but she's been tapped to manage the vendor relationship as well as translation requests. Diane instructed her to ask for quotes to translate Company X's Wordpress site and Product Oh Yeah into three languages.
In Part 1, Beth, a developer and Jill's colleague at Company X, did some database sleuthing and counted 30,856 words hosted on Wordpress and 17,888 words in Oh Yeah.
Diane did some quick math after Jill reported that almost 50,000 words need to be translated.
If an LSP's price for translating into Korean, German, and Spanish (US) is just $0.10/word (using round numbers for simplicity), that would equate to $5,000 per language, or a total of $15,000. That would exceed the earmarked budget of $10,000.
At this point, Jill and Diane do not know what the actual cost will be. They have not received a quote from any of the prospective LSPs. But, Diane thinks it is a safe bet that the prices will be higher than $0.10/word, so she makes a decision.
Hi Jill,
Good work getting those word counts. The numbers are higher than I expected.
We have to stay under budget because of financial constraints. Since the Wordpress site is the first visible piece of content for customer UX, please exclude Oh Year from this round of translation.
Please focus on getting Wordpress done in a timely manner. Hopefully we can stay under budget for all three target languages.
Thank you.
Diane
The removal of Oh Yeah from the plan makes Jill's life a little easier. Beth can download pages and posts from Wordpress fairly easily using a plugin, whereas externalizing strings from the database hosting Oh Yeah would be more complicated.
Now, Jill needs to figure out the steps that need to take place to carry out the translation.
Her first thought is about the maintainers of Wordpress. There are blog writers, editors, CMS architects, developers, and the like actively working on the site every day. She knows the content-creation and publishing schedule for English. She's the one who develops it for the most part. But how will requesting translations impact her colleagues? Especially the ones overseas?
She gets an idea. Jill recalls that her friend—Lisa, who works for another company called 'Apps for Everyone'—was similarly given the 'localization manager' moniker. Lisa coordinated the translation of their website into Korean a few years ago.
Jill reaches out.
Lisa's Experience
Jill and Lise meet for coffee.
In brief, Lisa tell her that Apps for Everyone hosts their website on Wordpress, just like Company X and half of planet Earth.
Lisa knew someone who worked for an LSP. Without going through a vetting process like Jill, Lisa trusted this person and placed an order with them for about 8,000 words of web pages to be translated into Korean.
It took the LSP about 10 business days. Apps for Everyone used a plugin to export what are called 'XLIFF' files to share with the LSP. Lisa explained that XLIFF files are bilingual files based on the XML standard. XLIFF stands for "XML Localization Interchange File Format."
Because they are bilingual and have a well-formed structure, they are ideal for using in translation tools. The LSP delivered the completed files to Apps for Everyone by sending XLIFF files to upload back to Wordpress.
The XLIFF files were uploaded as drafts, i.e., they were not published live immediately. Lisa said that this is an important detail.
Even if a webpage has been translated, edited and looks perfect in a translation tool, it should not auto-publish upon upload. The content often renders slightly differently in the CMS, necessitating some layout refinement.
Delivering a translation in draft also gives the customer time to evaluate it before making it live. This part of the workflow involves doing online quality assurance (online QA), which is a topic I cover in Part 5 of this series, Linguistic Quality Assurance.
Lisa said the process was generally smooth and the translations were good, but that they hit a snag when it came to doing updates. This is a lesson learned for Apps for Everyone because it impacted a crucial piece of the localization puzzle: translation memory (TM).
Here's how.
The TM is a bilingual database. It's a technology that has been used in computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools for decades.
TMs allow the reuse of approved translations to avoid redundant translation work. A well-maintained TM provides the benefit of saving money by recycling translations and it also ensures consistency of word choice and writing style over time. (Please see my Translation Memory Primer article for details.)
What Lisa's company did not appreciate at the time was that her Korean counterpart had made edits directly in Wordpress when the pages were uploaded as drafts. This is a big deal!
Lisa explained what happened.
The LSP uses TM files for every client as a standard procedure. They receive files to translate, add them to a project in a translation tool, and then attach a TM to that project.
The TM essentially 'sees' all the text requiring translation, and when there is a string of text that matches a translation in the TM database, the match will display to the translator. The translator can quickly accept and use the recommended match. This process keeps costs down and allows the translator to focus on only the new or updated content.
When updates to the Wordpress site were ready for translation, Lisa sent the LSP XLIFF files exported from Wordpress as she did the first time around. The files contained a mix of content that was unchanged and content that had been updated.
The LSP translated them and then sent Apps for Everyone the updated XLIFF files to upload to Wordpress. The problem was that the TM did not include the edits that had been added by Lisa's Korean colleague. The act of uploading the updated XLIFFs actually overrode all the edits that Lisa's counterpart in Seoul made. Oof.
Lisa talks about the email she received from the Seoul office alerting her to the situation, that we can surmise went something like this:
Hi Lisa,
I hope this finds you well.
I got an alarming email from one of my co-workers here in Seoul. It appears that the Korean website that you recently updated uses incorrect terms and expressions in several places. It caused some confusion with one of our enterprise customers.
I was surprised because I know I fixed those sections a few months ago. In fact, as I told you previously, I went through all the pages on the site after the first round of translations were uploaded and made stylistic changes as well as a few grammatical ones.
I was shocked to discover that all the edits I made are gone. Can you explain why? It took me about eight hours to do this. Do I have to redo them?
Regards,
Seoul Office Content Manager
Apps for Everyone
We all have bad days. In any case, Lisa begged forgiveness from her colleague, who grumpily made the changes again.
To break it down, Lisa recommended a process like this:
- Find an LSP you trust
- Configure the Wordpress site for localization
- If you have colleagues at overseas offices who have the linguistic expertise to approve the translations, keep them in the loop. (If not, ask the LSP how they handle QA.)
- Use a plugin to export/import files
- Share the files with the LSP for translation and upload them back via the plugin upon completion
- Pay special attention to updates. Any changes made directly in a CMS are not syncing to a TM.
Workflow and Coordination
Jill thanks Lisa and heads back to the office. She is excited. The conversation prompted questions to ask the prospective LSPs, and an idea for a flow chart to architect the Wordpress workflow. Above all else, she realizes that as localization manager, Jill will need to nurture internal relationships and coordinate across functions to pull it off.
Jill has worked with dev agencies and other third-party vendors before. New engagements go through a 'getting to know you' stage.
She feels like Apps for Everyone did not receive sufficient support from the LSP. The LSP should have given them guidance about keeping TMs up to date, syncing data, and the override problem.
At Company X, Jill expects that her colleagues at overseas offices will be understanding at first about helping to fine-tune translations. They are obviously much closer to the content than an outside vendor.
On the other hand, to mismanage the workflow and cause extra work for her colleagues would be a disaster. It would impact Jill's ability to localize not just the Wordpress site, but also Oh Yeah in the future. Diane would hear about it.
Diagrams.net - The Lost Art
Jill is motivated to write out the workflow. She has experience creating flow charts. Miro and Lucidspark are powerful modern apps brimming with cool features. They also offer free versions, but with a lot of strings attached. For this reason, Jill prefers Diagrams.net, the OG of online flow charting. It's free.
Here's what she did:
- Visited www.diagrams.net and used a template to create a new flowchart. It looked like this out of the box.
2. Re-familiarized herself with flow charting in general. Incidentally, here's a brief summary of the shapes to use in a flowchart and what they each mean.
- Rectangle with rounded corners: Start of process
- Diamond shape: Yes/No decision
- Rectangle: Process step
- Arrows: Connect decisions and processes
3. And after an hour or so, Jill came up with this.
Takeaways
About CMS Editing
Jill makes a mental note about risk mitigation: CMSs provide a comfortable editing environment for content creators and editors. Sometimes even a bilingual editing environment. This includes Wordpress, Contentful, ContentStack, Drupal, Zendesk, and plenty of others.
In most cases, these editors are not connected to a translation memory, nor other language assets like glossaries and style guides.
It is essential to capture the final work product in a translation memory (TM) that is typically maintained by your LSP. That way, you, as the buyer, will be certain that the LSP is always using the latest, approved translations.
About Visualizing Workflows
A simple flow chart like this is visual and easy to grasp at a single glace (especially for individuals who may be speaking English as a second language). It is ballast for the localization program that will depend upon many different stakeholders in far-flung places working in concert together.
It may need updating from time to time, but generally speaking, it was an hour well spent to starting the localization process on the right foot.
Thank you for taking the time to read this! I cover Pricing in Part 3 of the Buyer Series.
Localization Roles Used in This Series
Company X: A business with a Wordpress website and a flagship product called Product Oh Yeah. Both need to be translated.
Jill: The localization manager (LM) working for Company X. Jill's title is 'Content Manager.' She was hired to create and manage content in Wordpress, and she has no previous experience with localization.
Diane: Content Strategy VP at Company X. Appointed to oversee the localization budget. Xander wants to translate the Wordpress website and Product Oh Yeah into French (France), German, and Spanish (US) if the costs fit the initial earmark. If not, then Spanish (US) only.
Lisa: Friend of Jill working at another company, Apps for Everyone. Has some experience localizing a Wordpress website into Korean.
Beth: A Wordpress developer working at HQ for Company X.