The heat is on for you to produce well-translated content that follows the original layout while using the correct terminology.
From product manuals to social media posts, each document is different, yet they have to be consistent with one another.
You feel trapped in a copy-and-paste cycle. You also find that progress is slow and projects get stuck at different stages.
Want to keep up with demands to provide multilingual content? Translating things manually will only hinder your company’s growth. Here's why.
1. You’re draining time at every project stage
You're a marketer first, but translation projects drain your time and energy at every turn.
Setting up a project and preparing the files can take hours, if not days. You're manually extracting content, creating spreadsheets, and juggling content created in different file formats. It's a tedious process that eats into your productive time before translation even begins.
Then, you still have to assign and brief your translators. It's another time-sink where you're adding people to emails, sending files, and explaining project requirements. This process must be repeated for every language and every new collaborator, delaying your project kickoff.
The actual translation and review cycles are where things slow down even more. I'll talk more about this in the next sections.
What's the alternative?
Considering all these issues, what is the "ideal world" for marketers who manage translations?
As Soeren Eberhardt from Microsoft points out in Episode 1 of our Localization Decoded interview series:
2. The content contains inconsistencies and errors
Maintaining consistency across various content is almost impossible. Unless your team has hours to spare every day to scrutinize each piece before they go live.
If every translation is done manually, there is usually no central repository for your company's most important or most frequently used terms. No single source of truth for your collaborators, current and future, to refer to when working on new translation projects.
Your colleagues, vendors, and agencies you hire will likely struggle to translate key terms consistently. It's not easy to keep everyone aligned on the "right way" to translate.
In our experience, consistency is not just a matter of maintaining your brand voice across all languages. It's also about ensuring the correct use of special terminology, especially if you produce multilingual content for a niche or technical industry.
Furthermore, if your workflow involves translation agencies, you'll likely receive work you need to check and correct every time. Why? Because they may not be familiar with the industry jargon or brand terminology your company uses. And it's hard to find vendors who are.
So unless you supply some kind of "translation dictionary" or comprehensive brief beforehand, you'll probably end up spending more time reviewing each translation.
What's the alternative?
You should keep a shared database that your collaborators can automatically access when they're assigned to a project. In the translation context, this could be your company's Glossary or Translation Memories.
These can even be built into translation collaboration platforms like Redokun, where your translators receive automatic suggestions, powered by your databases, as they work on a document.
3. You face design and formatting issues in every project
Finished translating the text? Now you have to put everything together in a presentable way – ideally preserving the same layout and file format as your original document.
This is where most marketers are forced to drain so much of their time. You find yourself spending hours copy-pasting translations, adjusting text boxes, resizing images, and tweaking font sizes – all to accommodate the new text.
Even worse, you'll have to repeat the same process for every document in every language.
Manually transferring translations into the original design file is not only tedious but also prone to errors. This process can significantly slow down your time to market, especially when dealing with multiple languages.
Different file formats add another layer of complexity to your workflow. Whether you're working with InDesign brochures, PowerPoint presentations, or Word documents, each requires a different way of handling the design post-translation.
You're likely to run into formatting errors and inconsistencies across your marketing materials. Again, you'll spend time fixing them.
What's the alternative?
Most modern translation platforms like Redokun help you automatically preserve your document's original layout while you're translating it.
Generally, you can download your translations in the original file format you uploaded, with all formatting and styles intact. Now you can go to market 3x faster, without the need for time-consuming design edits.
4. Your translation costs never go down, only up
Manual processes are riddled with inefficiencies that take up your time and inflate your translation costs.
Every hour spent on manual file preparation, back-and-forth communication, and formatting issues is an hour you're paying for. These costs add up quickly, especially when you're dealing with multiple projects and languages.
Translation inconsistencies and errors also come with a price tag. When you have to spend extra time correcting translations, especially those repetitive texts that have been translated before, you're essentially paying twice for the same work.
As Chris Schmidt, the Managing Director from WhizCut pointed out, when you don't optimise your workflows, you could be translating far more words than necessary:
Translation management tools offer a way to break this cycle, reducing costs by streamlining processes, maintaining consistency, and automating time-consuming tasks.
In an ideal world, the more you translate, the faster (and cheaper) subsequent translations should be because you have more "translation data" to work with. You can achieve this with a translation management system.
The instant remedy for manual workflows
Using a translation management system (TMS) like Redokun is the key to streamlining your translation process. It's a simple yet comprehensive solution you can use to manage the volume, speed, quality, and costs of your translation projects.
Redokun is an online TMS that helps you:
- Create and start projects quickly without manual work
- Provides better control and visibility over the entire translation process
- Maintain terminology consistency with built-in glossaries, automatically shared with your translation partners and vendors
- Leverage past translations through translation memory, reducing future workload
- Facilitates real-time collaboration among team members and external translators
- Preserve document formatting, with support for multiple file types
- Significantly reduces translation costs over time
Moving away from a manual translation workflow lets you focus on what you're really here to do: Market better to your international audiences, instead of being knee-deep in tedious, repetitive tasks.
As Danilo Mantilla, International Project Coordinator at FranklinCovey, puts it:
Want to break the cycle of manual translations? Here's a risk-free way of starting today. Try Redokun free for 14 days and translate up to 10,000 words on us.
