A Guide to Manage Localization Projects Using Translation Management System
In this age of globalization, adapting your products and services to target regions is crucial. Localization plays a key role in determining your brand’s global credibility and how the target audience will perceive it. Considering the significance of localization, you must have the right tools and resources to pull it off correctly. Here is when a translation management system comes in.
A professional translation management system is a professional tool designed to manage your translation and other stuff that comes under the umbrella of localization. Each TMS can have its own specifications, and you can tailor them to your unique needs.
In this guide, we’ll explore how we can leverage a TMS for effective localization project management.
Contents
Guidelines To Effectively Manage Your Localization Project Using TMS
Project Planning
It all starts with effective planning. You should create a detailed localization plan that reflects your project goals and what you exactly want to accomplish.
Defining Project Scope
Here you have to make a quantitative analysis of how far your localization project would go. If you want to target just one foreign market at a simple, it will be a small-scope project. However, managing a large-scope project that caters to multiple markets requires more effort, resources, and time. To get things in order from the very beginning, you must clearly define your project scope and how you want to achieve your goals.
Establishing Project Timeline
Based on your project scope, you must set realistic milestones with deadlines. Using a localization management platform, you can break down your project into smaller tasks and set a timeline for completion. This way, you can smartly manage things in time and avoid delays.
Identifying Stakeholders
From your teammates, project managers, freelancers, and clients, everyone is a stakeholder who can directly or indirectly influence your project. It’s time to identify who you want to get on board to work on the project, who you will be reporting to, and who is the target audience for which you are doing localization in the first place.
Allocating Resources
Once you have identified the stakeholders, you should assign them suitable roles and responsibilities. Professional translation project management platform allows you to invite your team members on board. At this point, you can allocate each team member’s resources and define their authority.
Content Preparation
The next step is to make your content ready for translation and localization. A translation management system has a lot to offer when it comes to content management.
Optimizing Content for Localization
You will be working with multiple translators, so you better have content in optimized condition already to save their time and effort. For instance, if you want to translate software, you must keep the translated files outside the code. Moreover, making direct changes to the code can create a lot of mess with both the content and software.
Using Style Guides and Glossaries
To make sure that your translations are consistent, regardless of the number of translators working on them, you must provide them with clear guidelines. You can create and manage your translation glossaries and style guides directly from TMS, which allows your translators to have a clear idea of your brand tone and other requirements.
Setting up Translation Memory (TM)
Using the TMS, you can seamlessly manage your translation memory for all the previously done translations. You can use these translation databases in the future. Especially if your TMS has a machine translation engine, MT can significantly enhance its efficiency and speed.
Localization Process
A localization management platform can really make your localization processes seamless and hassle-free. It saves your time and optimizes the whole project localization journey.
Setting up Translation Workflows
With a professional TMS, you can streamline your translation operations and customize the task workflow. It allows you to manage your localization project in a more organized manner. This way, you can manage your everyday workload quite effectively and avoid chaos.
Collaborating with Localization Vendors
You can bring your all vendors together and enable seamless collaboration between them by using a localization platform. It is also a great tool if you have to deal with remote translators and freelancers. Your external team members can smoothly communicate with the in-house team and collaborate in real time.
Tracking Progress
Most advanced TMS tools allow you to track the progress of your localization project. It gives you a detailed idea of what is happening throughout the project and which areas need improvement. Moreover, these features also allow project managers to monitor the performance of each team member and keep everything in control.
Quality Assurance
Quality of localization is certainly not something to be overlooked, and your localization efforts must pass the quality test for sure.
Reviewing and Approving Translations
Once your content is translated for each region, it is time to proofread and review it to eliminate all potential errors. To err is human, so you can always expect your translations to contain mistakes. However, make sure that the initial translator and proofreader are two different persons. You can also use QA tools to detect errors, so if there are still some mistakes left, the QA system will highlight them.
Performing Linguistic and Functional Testing
It involves ensuring the content is linguistically accurate, and other user-facing and functional elements of a software or app are fully localized. This testing requires a complete audit of your website, app, or software all over again. You can perform this testing manually or by using some tool. TMS also provides some QA features that can test the linguistic and functional credibility of your finalized localized content.
Final Thoughts!
Professional localization platform comes with a lot of advanced features that can make your localization journey much easier. However, you should know how to make the most of these tools to get desirable results. A good example of a localization management platform is MarsHub, which contains advanced features to manage localization projects for global enterprises and LSPs.