How successful were your multilingual content efforts in 2024? What will your 2025 look like? These questions aren’t easy to answer without taking the necessary steps to gather and assess your localisation data. In this article, we take you through several tips and scenarios for ending this year and ringing in the next on a reflective and proactive note.
Evaluate your 2024 localisation efforts
- Analyse localisation-related data from the year gone by to determine whether you met your 2024 goals and what you want to change in the new year.
Without localisation data, analysing and planning an effective localisation strategy is nearly impossible. You need this to show the decision-makers in your company that you have managed your localisation budget well and made it go as far as possible. Such data could include how much you’ve spent, how much content has been localised and into which languages, cost and volume trends, or any other metric you find useful to track. You should be able to consult your language services partner for this data; they can keep track of such things for you.
However, to get the full picture, combine this information with data related to the performance of the multilingual content itself, like tracking visitors to your website pages or tracking how long they stay on the localised pages. By putting all this data together, you can see how your 2024 localisation strategy helped you achieve your company goals, as well as where you may have fallen short.
For example, if you’ve noticed that your sales in Sweden have jumped by 20% after localising your website and online FAQs into Swedish, but the same has not happened in the Danish market, this can be a point of change in the new year. Your marketing team and your language partner could analyse the Danish pages together and consider what may not be working for those consumers: How does the depth of your content compare with your competitors in Denmark? It could also be useful to analyse the Swedish pages in the same way to consider what is going well in that market.
- Consider the qualitative feedback and reviews you have received on localised content and discuss these with your language service partner.
Besides looking at quantitative data, it can also be a useful exercise to look at qualitative feedback from your stakeholders and focus groups regarding your localised content. What have your in-house team said about the localised materials? Have any clients noted inconsistencies or errors? And this doesn’t just have to be feedback about the final translated product, either. Has anyone involved in localisation on your end found the localisation process inefficient or ineffective? Why or why not?
Ultimately, you want to ask yourself: Based on the successes you achieved or mistakes you made in 2024, what can be improved for 2025? And how can you improve it? Then, discuss these observations with your language partner. This can help you set mutual goals that improve the process on both sides and address any concerns with the past year’s work.
- Take another look at your language assets and speak with your language partner about what you may want to add in the new year.
The end of the year can be a good time to plan projects and resource updates for 2025, but you must first reflect on the year gone by. Language assets like style guides, translation memories and glossaries are incredibly useful resources for linguists, and if you didn’t get the chance to ask them for feedback throughout the year, now is a good time to check in. Would they recommend any changes be made moving forward? How often do they consult the language resources?
Strategise and plan for a winning 2025
- Talk about your business goals with your language service partner.
When it comes to building an ongoing collaboration with a language services partner, it’s essential to share the goals and expectations you have in mind. Setting aside time for larger strategic discussions may feel like a waste of time when you have a project that requires a quick turn-around time, but it can significantly improve the long-term collaboration, streamlining processes and leading to greater overall satisfaction on both sides. As you head into a new year, sharing goals with your language partner means that they can be ready to handle changes like peaks in volume, new language combinations, or content adaptations due to rebranding.
- Proactively profile content you plan to write to estimate which solutions you will need from your language service partner.
Do you already know that you will need to update your internal policies at the start of 2025 across multiple languages? Are you going to try to penetrate any new markets in 2025 and need your website localised? Information like this can help inform your localisation budget and strategy for 2025, and you can consult your language partner to ask any specific questions about solutions or cost.
For example, if you wish to localise your website into German in the new year, you may want a quote for the overall project, as well as an understanding of the website localisation solutions that a language service provider can offer you, such as SEO and desktop publishing.
- Connect the relevant members of your team with your language service partner’s localisation team, encouraging good communication for the year ahead.
Without clear communication links between your team and the localisation team, whether it’s with a project manager or specific linguists, you’ll struggle to build a collaborative environment for discussions and setting actionable goals and milestones for the future. The start of the year can be the perfect time for connecting people, as they may have a little more time on their hands to set up a meeting and chat about their expectations for the year ahead.
But beyond this first step, how can you continue to facilitate good communication throughout 2025? Make time for regular business review meetings to discuss progress and challenges with your language partner and make sure to think about what is meaningful and productive for such meetings. Don’t feel that you need to invite and involve everyone from both parties just for show. For example, if the agenda for the meeting is strategic, keep the attendees to the appropriate management level people. If it’s hands-on production related, such as a meeting to discuss changes to a style guide, just invite the people from the teams managing the daily work.
Set yourself up for success in 2025
Taking the time to go through each of the steps above and consult with your language partner may seem long-winded, but heading into the new year with a clear plan can save you a lot of trouble further down the road. Take it from us, the key to seeing positive localisation results is to invest time in a localisation strategy that aligns with your business objectives and is communicated clearly to your language services partner.
For more on localisation strategy and analysis, contact us for a chat at info@stptrans.com.
