The Importance of Speed for Global Business

Introduction

To serve online customers in global markets the right way, you must meet their high expectations when it comes to user experience. That means providing a localized website that’s on par with your flagship website that always offers relevant, fresh content.

But if you’re localizing your website with a traditional translation agency, slow turnaround times will derail your ability to meet those expectations.

Read on to learn why translation speed is so important for your global online business—and what’s at stake when legacy translation approaches fail to keep pace.

Avoid the Risk of Launch Delays

If you’re already using a traditional agency for website translation, the workflow probably looks something like this:

• You experience production delays as your marketing and IT teams identify and extract new content for translation
• You wait two to three weeks as your translation agency completes the translations
• Your burn more time vetting and revising the translated content for accuracy and brand voice
• You experience even more delays as your marketing and IT teams wade through content to integrate and publish it on your localized site

This glacial pace is unacceptable for website translation.

Unfortunately, traditional translation agencies aren’t built for the speed needed for website translation. They simply aren’t equipped or trained to handle its unique technical and operational complexities. You’ll experience slow translation turn-arounds due to:

• Unacceptably long project timelines
• Complications arising from poorly planned project scopes
• Lengthy vendor meetings that slow the project to a crawl

And your internal teams, who need to assist your agency with the project, can become easily overwhelmed in the face of such complex projects. They often struggle to handle the workload in addition to their existing tasks.

These complications can stretch out a translation project on for months, or even years. This just won’t do for competitive global businesses that depend on speed-to-market.

Avoid the Minefield

There’s a way to sidestep the complications created by legacy translation agencies. Choosing a digital-first translation technology solution eliminates the risks of delayed expansion to new markets. You can also launch your localized website in as little as 30 days. You’ll get:

First-Mover Advantage: Generate opportunities to quickly increase brand recognition in market, and generate leads.

Fast Response to Competition: Match or beat your competition’s speed to market before they snap up market share.

Achieve Business Goals: Bring in new customers, boost profits and maximize other growth goals.

Avoid Cost Overruns: Avoid the delays and other complications that keep you out of the market longer, costing you vital growth opportunities—and running up costs.

Worry-Free Ongoing Maintenance

If traditional translation vendors fall short in localizing a website at launch, imagine the hassle of following that process every time a change is made to your website after launch.

It’s not unusual to add website content daily, and it’s often something critical, like new products or services. Every day your global customers don’t know about those offerings … and every day your local salespeople can’t support customers in-market … you’re losing money.

Ideally, new or updated content, regardless of medium—such as text, images, interactive applications, etc.—should be identified for translation, translated, edited, QA’d and published in about one business day.

That’s a translation turnaround that keeps pace with your online business. No legacy agency can reliably deliver website translations within that timeframe.

But superior online translation solutions can save you time and money by automatically detecting any new translatable content, queueing it for translation, and updating your translated website that quickly.

Conclusion

Are you willing to risk lost revenue in global markets by waiting weeks, months, or even years for traditional agencies to localize content for your multilingual sites?

The best translation solutions can launch your localized sites in as little as 30 days and deliver translations for fresh content within about one business day.

When you’re looking for a translation agency, consider whether they can offer:

• Superior speed to market, launching your multilingual site in as little as 30 days
• Thorough content-parsing technology to ensure all translatable content, in all media, is detected for translation before the project begins
• Intelligent change-detection technology that spots and automatically queues new content for translation on an ongoing basis
• Reliable translation deliveries of about one business day

Accept nothing less than a translation vendor that can deliver the online experience your global customers demand.