As more companies embrace corporate blogging, they’re challenged to address global audiences in their native languages. Although best practices for multilingual blogging are clearly still emerging, at Lionbridge we’re using some helpful strategies on our own Translation Blog that I wanted to share.
1) Identify local SMEs for content creation.
Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) with writing skills traditionally author blogs. If you work at a large global company and have SMEs in your customers’ markets, a decentralized approach may help you create multilingual content. Your SMEs can write and post original content in their local language. For the majority of companies without local SMEs, however, this may not be a viable option.
2) Prioritize which content to translate.
If you decide to translate all or part of your content, which content do you translate, for which countries and in what languages? And who decides? Some content – like FAQs – might have a long shelf life and will be worth the time and money to professionally translate. Other content, which may be more locally relevant with a shorter lifespan, might not be worth translating.
One approach is to have a decentralized process where the local point-of-contact (POC) determines what content to translate. This assumes you have resources available in-country to support this effort.
Another approach is to centralize the work and have someone on the marketing team identify which content to translate in specific target languages. This is less cumbersome and will result in faster turnaround; however, it can be quite expensive, especially if you translate content that no one reads.
For our blog, we decided to begin with a centralized approach and then move to a decentralized approach as we build a larger audience in local markets.
3) Decide what to do with the rest of the content.
What about content you decide not to translate that is created in either English or another language (what we call monolingual content)? You can give readers the option for real-time translation (RTTS) with a button on the tool bar for “Just in Time” translation vs. “Just in Case.” The quality won’t be on par with human translation, but it may be “good enough” and better than not providing any language option at all.
4) Don’t forget to engage with your readers via blog comments.
Engaging with readers is one of the main goals of a blog. Who will read the multilingual comments on your blog and respond to them in-language? RTTS may be a good way to understand a comment, but a human should always respond in the commenter’s language to ensure an appropriate dialogue. You should plan for this before posting multilingual content.
One option is to assign comments to an in-country POC to coordinate. Your approach will likely evolve and will largely depend on your in-country readership and the level of engagement you have with your readers. If your blog succeeds in other languages, increased engagement will be the result and that’s a good problem to have.
Do you have any best practices to share?
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{ 14 comments }
Good points.”Engaging with readers is one of the main goals of a blog” Yes you give some time out and participate in your blog it shows your readers you care and appreciate their time.
Thanks fro the post.
Twitter: DannyBrown
May 21, 2010 at 8:50 AM
Great information, Kathleen – the web has broken down geographical boundaries and businesses definitely need to be ready for all eyes.
One question – if you have a single blog, how would you ensure that everyone could understand, say, 16 different languages in the comments, and how would you advise other commenters to respond (if they wished)?
Thanks!
.-= From Danny Brown to you: A Quick Heads-Up on Access to the Blog =-.
Do you know blogs with multiple comment languages?
This is a real challenge. If you receive comments in languages other than the original post, one solution could be to use Google Translate to machine translate (MT) the comments and get the “gist” Some companies are putting the Google Translate button on their blog with a disclaimer on the quality since it’s not human translation. This solution is better than nothing, however the challenge comes in replying to the comment if you are the blog owner, or commenting on the comment if you are a reader. Personally, I would not be comfortable with the current MT technology, writing my responses in English and using and MT to translate it back to the original language comment and post. Too much could be lost in translation. I would recommend a native speaker review it or write the response in the native language for you. There is technology in the works that will provide for Real-Time translation (RTT) of a higher and customizable quality, it’s just not commercially available yet. We’ll be beta testing on my company’s blog http://blog.lionbridge.com soon. I hope it will help bridge this gap in multilingual communication.
Having worked on global corporate websites for many years and having lived all over the world, I completely agree with your best practices, particularly having a local SME working with your content. If they don’t do the direct translations (and localization – which is a further necessary step!) then they should review it post-translation and pre-publishing. I think this marks the difference between the companies that truly care about doing this right and those who just say they do.
.-= From Andi to you: French Friday – Beyond Paris – To Lose Toulouse =-.
I’ve had this point in my mind very often; my language is the Spanish and I struggle generally with my English as a second language. Who is my target? If I want a global target, it must be English, but a translator in a side bar (I know aren’t the best) can help a lot.
In my case, I comment or respond in Spanish/English if I’m pretty sure that the blogger can read/write these languages.
Other solution I’ve seen, is to have different blogs for different languages of course, time-consuming!
Thanks Kathleen and Ari for this article!
Cheers,
Gera
.-= From Gera @ SweetsFoodsBlog to you: Foodies, Social Media Tips, Blogging, Health & Eating: Best of the Week =-.
Some might argue it’s the readers responsibility to have translation devices on THEIR machines, rather then dumping it in the writers lap…what say you?
.-= From Dennis Edell @ Direct Sales Marketing to you: UPDATED: Aweber Affiliate Link Contest! – This Is It!! =-.
A good translation agency should be able to go one step better than finding you a local SME. Local freelaners of your industry might be more suitable. Also if you use Wordpress to power your blog, there is a great plugin called qtranslate to enable Wordpress for multiple languages. Web-Translations is a cost effective provider of professional translation to users of the qtranslate plugin.
Finding human translators is not the issue, there are thousands of freelancers, translation agencies and language service providers that can provide human translation for multilingual content, including blogs, websites, knowledge bases, etc. The point is, when it comes to blogs, translating all of the content on an ongoing basis into mutiple languages is cost prohibitive. Our customers are among the largest global companies in the world and most of them are still developing their strategy around their blogs and making it available in multiple languages for their global customers. They simply don’t have the budget to translate it all by humans and are looking for alternative solutions.
You have some good points here. I will read it once again and study it for my websites that are in different languanges.
.-= From Morten Pedersen to you: Cuvée du Baron ( Château Fortia ) 2001 =-.
It really depends on your target audience and the goals you have for your blog. If your goal is to communicate with readers that speak/read only in your language, then language is not a factor for you. If your goal is to communicate with a global audience, making your blog available to your target audience in their language will increase your readership and engagement. As a side benefit, it will also help your SEO efforts in the languages you provide since you will now have multilingual content. We know from a study by Common Sense Advisory, “Can’t Read, Won’t Buy: Why Language Matters on Global Websites” (Aug06) – “They unequivocally told us that they prefer to have websites in their own language, across a wide range of goods and services.” Personally, my audience is global, I have offices in 26 countries and it’s important that I make my content easily accessible to them so they are comfortable engaging and participate in the conversation.
Nice article. I feel that blogging in different languages allows you to easily communicate with people regardless of their language. However translating or writing blogs in several languages isn’t enough, but it is necessary to write content reach in relevant keywords for that targeted country and build up backlinks from local websites. Thanks for sharing these tips.
Ariel, thanks for your feedback and comment. I agree with you 100%. If you can treat the local languages like you treat your native language blog, optimized for keywords and in-country backlinks, that would be the ideal situation. It all comes down to time and money. If a company has the budget and resources, that’s definitely what I would recommend. However, realistically, I don’t think many will be able to afford this for all of their posts, though some may be able to selectivly implement for those posts with longer shelf life.
It all comes down to time and money. If a company has the budget and resources, that’s definitely what I would recommend. However, realistically, I don’t think many will be able to afford this for all of their posts, though some may be able to selectivly implement for those posts with longer shelf life.
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