At any global business, you are constantly facing the challenge of staying connected internally across different countries, as well as communicating externally with customers in local markets. To inform decision-making when it comes to content strategy, including multilingual content creation, you use data; for example, website insights might tell you 70% of your users are in the United States, or you might learn from HR that 30% of your staff speak German as their first language. But data only paints half the picture by telling you who your target audience is; you also need to consider the nature of your daily content. This article provides you with guidelines to help you identify, prioritise and transform the content you work with into valuable information for your business.
Corporate content challenges in a global landscape
For any global business, having multilingual content is undoubtedly beneficial, but when faced with budget and time constraints, prioritisation becomes fundamental. A deep understanding of your content and its intended audience enables you to tell when creating multilingual versions is critical for your brand’s success.
For example, the EU Whistleblowing Directive requires public institutions, companies with 50 or more employees and local government authorities with over 10,000 inhabitants to provide reporting channels, information security and anonymity for whistleblowers. While this has implications for many parts of such organisations, it is primarily the responsibility of HR and regulatory compliance departments to enforce and communicate the new rules. They must produce new and updated content to protect whistleblowers, such as a privacy policy for data protection, updates to their anti-retaliation policy and even the parameters of the company’s whistleblowing channel itself, perhaps including a landing page with a form for reporting. With accessibility as a key requirement of the directive, this must be available in local languages for all countries in which the company operates, and the department would need to translate these documents carefully and accurately.
In the marketing department, on the other hand, content is customer-facing and must consistently be of a high-impact nature. For the organisation’s website, localisation becomes a crucial tool to broaden the company’s reach and appeal. The same principle applies to mobile apps, online advertising and email marketing campaigns. The decision to create multilingual content is influenced by factors such as the international scope of the target audience, the chosen platform and the objective of a particular campaign.
There is also content that is relevant to multiple parts of a business, such as a sustainability report, which outlines the company’s impact on the environment and society. While a sustainability report is typically a voluntary undertaking and not a regulatory requirement, it serves as a platform to communicate the company’s mission and values to investors, employees and customers. To effectively communicate such insights to a diverse audience, the company may consider offering multilingual versions of the report.
3 ways to decipher your content
Perhaps your role doesn’t involve HR, marketing or sustainability reporting, and you are wondering: how do I define the purpose and value of my content? Here are three categories that provide a useful lens for analysing the documents you’re working with: essential to your brand, necessary for regulatory compliance and valuable for insight.
The first category is content that is integral to your business. This could include annual reports, sustainability reports, websites and product or service information, as well as press releases or media kits. If you sell products through your website and are focused on business expansion, then translating your e-commerce platform becomes crucial. If you rely on digital advertising for sales and revenue, localising this content is one of your top priorities.
The second category is compliance and applies to content you must translate to comply with local regulations in different countries. It could be internal content, such as your whistleblowing policy or an intellectual property policy. Alternatively, it could be related to your product or service, such as product details, instructions for use or documentation required for specific certifications or standards such as ISO.
The third category includes content that is beneficial to have in multiple languages in order to gain or share understanding and insight. Such content could be an internal knowledge base, materials for a tender, survey feedback or online reviews.
The three categories may of course overlap; an employment contract, for example, is required for regulatory compliance and it’s also critical to your company and brand. But evaluating your content in this way provides a useful framework for you to understand how each piece fits into a multilingual strategy, helping you better determine not only what you should translate, but also how you should translate it.
Automated solutions with a human in the loop
How many ways are there to translate a document? Thanks to the advancements in automated solutions, there are a variety of options, each more or less aligned with your specific content needs and resource availability.
With the advent of AI, particularly ChatGPT, content creation automation has become a hot topic in localisation. There are also more established innovations, like machine translation, that increase productivity and efficiency. But if creating multilingual content is not your core business, how do you know what technology to apply and what quality checks to build into the process?
This is where your content categories form a key part of your strategy. Here at Sandberg, we have helped many of our clients see that for documentation that is essential to your business or necessary for regulatory compliance, the content localisation process must have a higher degree of human input and quality control. For content that is nice to have for information purposes, you can make do with lower-cost automated solutions.
Sandberg’s language services account for differing localisation needs depending on the content types you are working with, including purely human-driven solutions as well as a wide range of automated and machine-led workflows. We take pride in the fact that behind every single solution is our professional team of qualified linguists whose research and work enable us to consistently enhance these services. Their human skill ensures the continuous monitoring and ongoing improvement of our artificial intelligence solutions.
We believe that language is a vehicle for human communication and that you need human intelligence to make your multilingual content go far.
