When making decisions, localization buyers often focus on cost and timing of translation, but overlook the monetary and opportunity costs of their own file processing. Activities such as gathering files for translation, running diffs, checking the formatting, packaging and sending files to a translation vendor all take people, resources, and time, which decelerates development velocity. Then it all happens again when the files have to be incorporated, further hindering an agile localization process.
A Friction-Filled Process
For localization managers, it is a friction-filled process, which saps their time from more strategic pursuits.
Organizationally, it puts a drag on continuous development as localization doesn’t keep up with development, given the human factor delays. When you multiply that over multiple branches and sprints, and even multiple products and languages, you have a serious disconnect. This results in higher operational costs and delays of new features to global users. If as a company, you have global goals, like increasing sales and usership worldwide, that localization drag has a direct effect on your ability to delight users with new features in a timely manner.
Even Minor Issues Can Become Major
Consider the seemingly innocuous case of a tag adjacent to text that an individual is translating and that gets accidentally deleted in the process. Might seem like a minor issue. Yet if that causes major problems with parts of your application after release to a specific market, the damage to the brand extends beyond the customer’s frustration and escalates up to the reputation of the brand. It then reverberates back to the development team as time needs to be spent putting out fires instead of focusing on new sprints and developing new features.
Now, multiply that one case by 100 or 200, and you can see the ramifications a manual, inefficient, error-prone localization process can have on your software development for international markets.
Achieving Quantum Leaps in Productivity, Efficiency, and Scale
When looking to achieve not just small incremental gains in productivity, but rather quantum leaps in productivity, efficiency, and scale, turn to technology. Look to extract the random nature that comes from an overreliance on an individual, and instead implement automated, scalable systems to ensure that processes are adhered to, consistency is ensured, and human error is minimized.
Achieving high efficiency in your software release process for international markets is critical if you plan to expand geographically. It’s one thing to manage localization into one, two, or three languages. When you try to scale your business to handle 10, 20, or 30+ languages, the lack of an efficient, frictionless process limits your growth. Use systems to help you get your business where you want it to go.
10X Globalization Webinar
To learn how to achieve 10X productivity gains with your internationalization and localization efforts, view the recording of our 10X Globalization webinar.
