Revolution in Localization: the new workflows are here!

This is the start of a new era for the localization industry.
For decades content has been generated in one language and localized for the international markets.
Are you ready to embrace the future and publish content directly intended for your target audience and written in their language without losing time or money?

As far as we localization peeps can remember, the global players marketing teams have been creating content in their home language and pushing it through complicated localization workflows to make it palatable to their global customers. The hiccups? Localized content is not always resonating abroad as well as intended; the workflows are time consuming, technology heavy and expensive! Lots of time and energy is involved into measuring the quality of projects, classifying into pass or fails, reworking them etc. in order to make them the perfect translation of the original content; only to find out in subsequent customer surveys abroad that the content isn’t understood, isn’t culturally relevant etc.

Let’s be honest, whether we are talking about machine translation post editing (MTPE) or transcreation; the workflows to create localized content are complex and archaic.  On the client side, we are talking about project managers, quality managers, vendor managers; on the vendor side we have engineers, project managers, quality managers, vendor managers, solutions architects, knowledge leaders, program managers etc.  The headache and complexity also comes from the very tools that are needed to operate a localization program, known as CAT tools. Those tools break the content into segments to leverage existing translations to decrease cost and pull up the reference materials for stricter adherence to guidelines. Ensue a complicated process to reconstruct the texts, often with big nonsenses, and invoice all the segments one by one.

The cost of operating with CAT tools, translation memories and machine translation is often disregarded as clients look at their per word price instead of the full cost of operating a large team on their end to ensure everything is done properly on the vendor side.

But is this still really needed? We’d like to make the case that it is mostly not. Whether it is for B2B or B2C, the new gen AI technologies available provide us with an opportunity to ditch the old workflows by simplifying the way we generate content for global markets. How? By creating it directly for the target audiences in their home languages and removing the entire localization step.  

What does it take and what to expect?

Define the expected outcome: In a typical workflow, this step happens internally at the companies. The content teams meet and define the expected outcomes for the content to the writing team who will then produce the content in one language; who will then hand the original version to the localization and kick off a long process. In this new workflow, this first meeting includes Acerca consultants (one for each language) who will take all the information in and compute it in a way that allows our technology to create the content directly in all the required languages, following cultural specificities and sensibilities.

Just like you would for a traditional project, companies will need to provide reference material such as: brand book, style guides, and language glossaries to make sure that the output will be truthful to the brand.

Content Generation: This step is all done by Acerca consultants who will set the parameters of the engine with the inputs gathered in step 1 and instantly move to step 3. The tool used by Acerca is a dedicated technology that is able, after ingesting the inputs mentioned above, to instantly create content in the form of text, images, emails, banners etc. This tool is based on the ultimate GenAI technology available in the market and is constantly updated and developed.

Curation: Once the content has been generated by our proprietary technology, it will be reviewed by our consultants to make sure the goals defined in step 1 have been reached and that the content is ready to be validated by the buyer.

This workflow may seem too simple to localization folks. We get it; but if you take some perspective, aren’t all the errors introduced by the lack of context inherent to CAT tool translation? Isn’t the lack of adherence to the localized content induced by the fact that it originated in a different part of the world? Think about the time and money that can be saved by using this out of the box workflow. No more CAT tool, no more Machine Translation post editing.

We have the opportunity to try something new with this workflow that leverages technology to speed up the whole process and reduce costs; and creates engaging content. Let’s do a pilot and make history!