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Translating websites for e-Commerce

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Translate websites to break the language barriers!

Oh how we love July and August: summer time, vacation time, but also sales time! We are in 2017, so when one says sales, the consumer hears online-shopping while companies hear opportunity for e-Commerce. The beauty of e-Commerce is that you can order pretty much anything while cozying up under a blanket at home. Just the thought of it is soothing. And indeed, 73% of online buyers thought so and had planned on shopping online for the 2017 winter sales according to the Consumer Science & Analytics institute. But what does that have to do with multilingual translation? Why translating websites is so important?

 

Let’s put ourselves in the shoes of an international consumer.
He or she goes online to buy something specific and notices that the website is only in French or English.
Will the consumer buy the product anyway?
Not so sure.

 

According to the Common Sense Advisory, most consumers will not buy from a website that is not in their native language. This is true for 78% of the Japanese, 71% of the French and Germans, and between 50 and 60% of the Turks, Russians, Brazilians, Indonesians, Spanish and Chinese.

The stakes of international e-Commerce are huge. The Ecommerce Europe Association published a report in June stating that European e-Commerce increased by 15% to €530 billion in 2016, and was forecasted at €602 billion for 2017.

 

 

5 reasons to start translating websites

We are clearly in a digital era and every year e-Commerce is gaining one point of market share over bricks and mortar sales.

So the best way to boost your e-Commerce is by translating your website into the languages of your target customers. By doing that, you will:

  • Increase the number of international viewers
  • Increase the average session duration
  • Increase your sales (including high-priced items or services)
  • Satisfy and retain customers
  • Optimize your website’s ranking on search engines

Conclusion: whether a website is translated into one’s native language or not has a huge impact on purchasing behavior.

We are already halfway through summer, but that’s okay. Get ready for winter sales by breaking the language barriers with multilingual translation and boost your e-Commerce!

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Can you reach the world with English?

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How many people actually speak English?

English is one of the most widely spoken languages ​​in the world, and more and more people are learning the language of Shakespeare.

In fact, English is the 3rd most spoken language in the world after Mandarin and Spanish. Today, approximately:

  • 450 million people speak English as their first language
  • 750 million speak English as a foreign language

As the map below reveals, English is understood by a significant proportion of the world’s population.

 

 

Some companies believe that they can succeed in their internationalization strategy with English translations only. Yet only 1.2 billion of the more than 7 billion inhabitants of our planet speak English (The rest speak approximately 7000 languages). So to answer the question “does everyone speak English?”.

The answer would be “no”.

But you don’t need to translate your website into 7000 languages. According to the Common Sense Advisory, an independent research firm, you would have to translate your website into just 14 languages ​​to be understood by 80% of the online world.

Even if English is one of the most widely spoken languages, translating only into English (or only into Chinese or Spanish) could lead to missing out on promising markets. In addition, speaking directly to your target markets in their language helps you avoid any ambiguities that could harm your company’s image. Optimizing content in multiple languages can help you win your customers’ trust.

 

For your website, more languages = more markets, more visitors, more customers

On e-Commerce sites, customers are six times more likely to make a purchase when addressed in their language, according to the Common Sense Advisory.

Translation to the languages of your target markets can also improve your position on local search engines with multilingual SEO to bring international visitors to your site.

If you want to sell your products or services on a specific market, consider translating your content and website into other target languages, in addition to English.

At Lexcelera, languages ​​are our passion.

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50 Million words from Translators without Borders!

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50 million words: a major milestone

October 12th 2017, Translators without Borders – the non-profit organization founded by translation company Lexcelera – announced a major milestone: 50 million words translated to support global aid.

In just 6 years, Translators without Borders (TWB) has provided 50 million words of translation to humanitarian organizations for development aid and crisis response programs.

From facilitating communication with the Rohingya refugees to informing the Grenfell Tower survivors to translating health information during the Ebola crisis, Translators without Borders has been on the front lines of virtually every international humanitarian crisis to help the world’s most vulnerable people.

 

Fifty million is not just a number,” said Lori Thicke, the Co-founder, with Ros Smith-Thomas, of Traducteurs sans frontières (in 1993) and the Founder of Translators without Borders (in 2010).

“The contribution of 50 million words to global aid is a stunning achievement made possible by the growing community of Translators without Borders,” said Thicke, who is also Lexcelera’s CEO and Founder.

“I believe that language is the missing piece in humanitarian action and that TWB is working today at scale to fill in that gap.”

 

Lexcelera salutes the tens of thousands of volunteers who are part of the Translators without Borders community and who have made the milestone of 50 million words possible.

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Lori Thicke receives ATC Award

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CEO of translation company Lexcelera wins ATC Award

London, September 21st 2017. Lori Thicke has received the ATC award for ‘Outstanding Contribution to the Language Industry’. The Association of Translation Companies (ATC) recognized Lori for being an industry inspiration after creating translation company Lexcelera more than 30 years ago and later founding Translators without Borders (TWB), the world’s largest translation charity.

 

Lori Thicke is recognized for her contribution to the language industry

 

“I was proud to receive such an honour from the ATC,” said Lori Thicke, the Founder and CEO of Lexcelera.

“But this award isn’t just for me: it’s recognition of the voluntary work that so many people have done for TWB – the tens of thousands of translators, project managers, interpreters, editors and language service providers who support us.”

 

According to the ATC website, “Canadian Lori founded translation company Lexcelera in Paris in 1986 and it has since grown to a global organisation with offices in London, Paris, Vancouver, Buenos Aires and Singapore.

She founded TWB in 1993, expanding it considerably after the 2010 Haiti earthquake, and it has donated nearly 50 million translated words in just the last six years to humanitarian organisations around the world.

Read the full press release about the ATC Language Industry Summit Awards.

 

About the ATC Award

The Association of Translation Companies (ATC) is the world’s longest established professional association representing the interests of Language Service Providers. It was incorporated in 1976 by a group of translation companies in Britain.

The ATC has expanded significantly over the last 40 years and now has members from all over the world. It is the leading voice for companies operating in the UK’s expanding language services industry, which is worth more than £1 billion and employs more than 12,000 people.

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International Mother Tongue Day

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The year 2018 marks the 18th anniversary of International Mother Tongue Day.
For Translation Company Lexcelera, languages ​​remain an eternal passion, which is why we want to remind our readers of the importance of mother tongues.

 

Why is mother tongue important?

The mother tongue, as indicated by its name, is the first language a child learns in his or her home environment. It is not just a way of communicating, but a way of connecting to the outside world. The mother tongue usually represents the mother’s impact on the child’s life.

Since we learn our first languages at home, one might wonder if anyone could learn a foreign language simply by living in a guest-house for a few years. Yet, some linguists say that for a second language, the learning process is totally different: the mother tongue is built through a “bottom up” approach while a foreign language ​​learning process is the opposite.

One might think it impossible to lose one’s mother tongue, but there is indeed a risk of losing it.

There are two ways this could happen. For one, just like with any kind of activity, if you stop practicing for a while, you can actually forget it.

Since “all learning begins with a transfer of knowledge from the mother tongue to a foreign language”, according to Brigitte A. Eisenkolb, Doctor of Linguistics and Psychology, a mother tongue could also be lost due to the influence of a new language.

 

Did you know? Half of all mother tongues could disappear…

Not only is it possible to forget one’s mother tongue, but there is also a risk of mother tongues dying out altogether. According to UNESCO, linguistic diversity is increasingly threatened: on average, one language disappears every two weeks. Scientists say 50% of the 7000 languages spoken today ​​could disappear in the course of this century.

Speeding the loss of mother tongues is the fact that approximately 500 languages ​​are spoken by less than 100 speakers worldwide, and 90% of the content on the web is written in only about ten languages.

The endangered languages ​​in Europe today include:

  • Walloon (Belgium)
  • Moselle Franconian (Luxembourg)
  • Western Frisian (Netherlands)

To preserve the use of mother tongues for future generations, young people should be encouraged to learn their mother tongue so they can pass it on to their children, and the transmission of information through local languages – particularly online – should be supported.

L’article International Mother Tongue Day est apparu en premier sur Lexcelera.

Lexcelera wins 18th ISO 9001 certification

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Lexcelera is ISO 9001 certified for the 18th year

Paris, March 5th, 2018 – With more and more companies going international, Lexcelera is doing everything to maintain the best quality of its translation services for their customers. Lexcelera is proud to be a certified translation company, and was the first French translation provider to obtain the ISO 9001 certification in 2000.

Thanks to the entire team, the satisfaction survey conducted between december 2017 and january 2018 shows that 97.5% of our clients surveyed would recommend our services.

The 18th renewal of its certification testifies to the excellence of the language services provided by Lexcelera and its unflagging commitment to customer satisfaction.

We are proud to announce that the company transitioned to the newest version of the certification: ISO 9001:2015.

 

What is ISO 9001:2015 certification?

 

“ISO 9001 provides a model for a quality management system which focuses on the effectiveness of the processes in a business to achieve desired results. The standard promotes the adoption of a process approach emphasizing the requirements, added value, process performance and effectiveness, and continual improvement through objective measurements.”

 

Previous versions of ISO 9001 were tailored to the manufacturing industries and called for extensive system documentation. The current version is more generic and applies equally well to all organisations, regardless of type, size, and product provided.

DNV – GL

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Lexcelera Ranked Among Best International Communication Companies

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Lexcelera joins rankings of largest language service companies in Western Europe

Independent market research firm Common Sense Advisory has ranked Translation Company Lexcelera as one of the largest language services providers in Western Europe as well as the 7th largest in France.

This is the first time Paris-based Lexcelera has made it to the annual global rankings of the best translation companies. The rankings were produced by the leading independent research firm for the language industry, the Common Sense Advisory (CSA Research). The 14th annual survey on the size and growth of the language services and technology market covers private and public language service and technology companies worldwide.

The current global survey is based on revenues published at the end of 2017.

Today, translation company Lexcelera has come in at number 37 in Western Europe. CSA Research had previously estimated the number of translation and interpretation companies overall at more than 26,000 across 150 countries. In France alone there are approximately 1500 translation agencies.

 

 

“The CSA global ranking is the best benchmark for our industry, and we are pleased to be included this year,” says Lori Thicke, Lexcelera CEO. “It shows us that quality work, and of course, great people, really pays off.”

In other findings, the report highlighted the size of the market for outsourced language services and supporting technology, valued at US$ 43.08 billion worldwide. CSA Research estimated the market growth at 6.97% from 2016 to 2017.

 

New linguistic services designed for international communication

Lexcelera predicts even stronger market growth in the coming years for language services, as cross border sales of products and services increases.

 

“Our customers lead on a global level, which means that they rely on language support to communicate internationally,” says Lexcelera’s Operations Director, Laurence Roguet. “This means not just traditional language services like translation and interpreting, but also new services such as creating multilingual content and web sites that respond to the keywords used in local markets.”

 

Demand for language services will only increase over time

According to Don DePalma, CSA Research’s founder and Chief Strategy Officer, “The sheer number of countries, people, and languages – many of them in markets experiencing tremendous economic growth – assures that demand for language services will only increase over time.”

Other studies undertaken by CSA Research have identified the strongest possible business case for companies to localize their content:

 

“As our research conclusively demonstrates, people are much more likely to purchase products in their own language.” says DePalma. ” In addition, localization reduces customer care costs and increases brand loyalty.”

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Lex MyWords: Interviews with a Software Company & a University

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The Lex MyWords terminology management application enables you to search our domain-enriched terminology databases when you need to know how to translate an industry-specific term.

Allow these interviews with two of our users to tell you more about the benefits offered by our app.

(the names of interviewees and the companies they represent have been redacted for reasons of confidentiality)

software
Software Company

How do languages affect your everyday business?

“We create software solutions for professionals and distribute our products all over the globe. Our applications are available in French, British and American English, Spanish, and Arabic. 

We recognize that in order for us to make comprehensible, user-friendly software, we have to pay attention to the quality of the language we use.”

Why do you use Lex MyWords?

“The Lex MyWords app has contextualized glossaries in five different languages, which helps us ensure consistency of terminology across all our interfaces and documentation.

The app’s focus on context allows us to quickly and easily find the right terms in every language in which we operate.”

What are the advantages of this app?

“Adding, correcting, or validating a term is a very fast process. The editors use a database of validated terms that’s updated in real time.

Every software update automatically pushes an update to all our contextualized glossaries.

Lex MyWords is a solution that facilitates complete terminological consistency, ensuring not only that the terms are homogenous, but that their accents and capitalization are too. It also creates more opportunities to recycle existing content.”

diploma (1)
Institute of Higher Education

How do languages affect your everyday business?

“According to the Times Higher Education rankings, our institution is one of the top 30 universities in the world.

Students come from all over the world to study with us. Our print and digital marketing materials are read by a large international audience and play a role in strengthening the university’s brand abroad.

Thinking multilingually is integral to our content strategy.”

Why do you use Lex MyWords?

“Both the names of our degrees and diplomas and the titles of our faculty and staff have to be completely consistent across all our communications.

The Lex MyWords app allows us to centralize all the key elements of our communications in glossaries for each target language.”

What are the advantages of this app?

“We can validate new terms with a click. The software facilitates real-time interaction with Lexcelera when it comes to translating and localizing our content.

The result is perfectly consistent terminology in the communications we use to convey our institution’s brand to our international students and partners.”

Advantages
  • Instant control of appropriate terminology for editors.
  • Rapid addition, correction, and validation of terms in all target languages.
  • Real-time interaction with Lexcelera staff.
Benefits
  • Complete terminological consistency, not only across terms, but across grammatical and syntactical elements such as accents and capitalization too.
  • Better reuse of existing content.

Want to try out Lex MyWords ?

L’article Lex MyWords: Interviews with a Software Company & a University est apparu en premier sur Lexcelera.


How Digital Marketing is changing the approach to translation – Part I

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Global digital marketing can get complex. Consisting of search, social media, websites, blogs, the whole gamut of digital marketing poses challenges when it comes to repeating home market successes in foreign locales. Such cross-cultural localization involves three key elements: people, processes, and tools. In this post, we’ll talk about how you can set your teams up for success as well as how you can reach out to external resources for their expertise in localizing brand content.

People

If marketing must remain relevant anywhere, it must speak to and resonate with the target audience. And, how do you do that in a locale where the language and culture are very different from that of your home country’s? Enter the localization team.

But, hey, you may not have a localization team in your company at all. Well, all companies start that way, but the important thing to remember is that you cannot continue on your global journey without one. Your localization team may consist of one person initially, but make sure that internationalization and localization are their only core tasks. Forget about asking your Italian-speaking employee to handle the translations for your Italian website. Localization is a full-time job.

Working with the localization team may be a new experience to the marketing team to start with. Few things to keep in mind to eliminate friction between the teams and enable better understanding:

 

  • Top-down push for collaboration: The need to work with localization should be mandated right from the Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) level. This helps to put in place clearly delineated practices for collaboration between the two teams. Also, CMOs will then be able to see how a mere 5% budget allocation for localization can be a big cause of their dissatisfaction with adapting brand content to different markets and geographies.

 

  • Understand each others’ priorities and language: Though the end goal of both marketing and localization may be the same – deliver an engaging brand messaging and product to the target audience – the way they go about achieving it is not necessarily so. Both teams need to understand each others’ targets and priorities and work to enable them. Learning each others’ jargon can also help in increased awareness of the other’s function. For instance, marketing may speak in terms of buyer personas, call-to-action, cost of customer acquisition, while localization would concern itself with terminology management, long-tail languages, QA tools, and so on.
Outsource Localization

Companies also often choose to outsource localization. If you opt for this approach, language service providers (LSPs) are great resources to tap into for taking your message to different locales at scale. We list below a few areas where you can leverage your partnership with an LSP to the maximum:

 

  • Go direct and upfront. You may be already working with an LSP through your digital marketing partner and not know it. Insist on working directly with them, if so. Remember, you are paying for the services of an LSP without getting maximum value from them. Collaboration with an LSP needs to be from the very beginning of the localization project rather than way downstream. This is so that you don’t make costly mistakes which could be avoided in the first place. LSPs can coach your content creation team on how to write global-ready content. They can also advise you on website globalization and internationalization standards so that you don’t have to rewrite the code on which your website or app runs each time you launch a new language; so that your international customers are not put off by forms that break; so that they can easily find their language on your website, and so on. These are not areas of expertise for your digital marketing agency.

 

  • Consult on tools. The localization tool landscape of today is diverse, complex, and growing. It caters to a wide variety of requirements and figuring out which ones are worth investing in needs some level of knowledge and experience in localization management. Here’s where LSPs can prove to be invaluable again. They know the languages and markets you are operating in, the volume of content you are looking to translate, your budget, your available resources internally for management of localization tools. With this data, they can put together a list of tools from which you can choose. However, you may not yet be ready for or require a full-scale investment in a translation tool. Global enterprises frequently want to use their existing content creation and management systems for online marketing and for translation tools to plug into this infrastructure. Your LSP can make this possible  and bring about quicker and easier onboarding for your teams. It also does away with manual file handoffs and other manual touch points where there is scope for errors to creep in.

 

  • Not just translation. LSPs’ services go beyond translation, so make sure you are availing them. Global digital marketing is not just about rendering your brand messaging in another language, but also in another culture. LSPs understand how to adapt your message in a foreign locale, so that you don’t end up with a culturally tone-deaf campaign. Sometimes even your product naming might need re-thinking.

 

  • Learn about localization. LSPs can provide training to your team members and help in instituting or streamlining globalization processes. Use LSPs as a learning resource so you can quickly ramp up time to market instead of charting the entire journey on your own. Ask for dedicated resources to work with your marketing team – it helps in building a sustainable, tightly integrated relationship based on trust and a deep understanding of your company’s globalization goals.

Building global-ready teams does not happen overnight, but it can yield rich results over time. Such teams are diverse, resilient, and grow with challenges instead of giving in. However, a lucid vision of the requirements for global success needs to come from the top.

In our next installment, read about how you can develop processes and use tools for efficient and scalable international online marketing.

 

 

Vijayalaxmi Hegde

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How Digital Marketing is changing the approach to translation – Part II

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In a previous blog post, we talked about one of the three key elements in global digital marketing: people. In this installment, we discuss the other two: processes and tools. Once you have recruited your localization provider , it’s time to set up solid processes and consider the tools required for efficient team collaboration, project management, and quality translation.

Processes

In the age of agile development, tight integration with the language service provider (LSP) is a prerequisite when selling across locales. With development cycles shortening from yearly, six-monthly, quarterly, monthly to now weekly or even daily releases, multilingual content too needs to fall in step. In companies with a clear focus on global marketing, the LSP is often considered a part of the product team. Such integration enables the LSP to advise on global content creation, review, and feedback processes that need to be instituted in an agile environment.

 

And, how does this help? Localization professionals can help with writing for diverse audiences around the globe by following some standard authoring practices. This would ensure that the content is translation-ready, and is not necessarily geared to only one locale. It would also help in keeping the brand voice consistent.

 

Next, consensus needs to be built on the review process: what levels of error tolerance are required for the different types of content? Some content types may skip a lengthy review process once you have enough confidence in your relationship with your localization partner. If possible, do dry runs of translation and review processes, so that you can identify problem areas and make sure the development and localization teams are on board.

 

Establish clear channels of communication between product, marketing, and the LSP. The structure and nomenclature of these teams may vary from company to company, but the point here is that unless these teams work together and have a healthy exchange of feedback, time to market may be adversely impacted and quality may vary.

 

Also, different formats of digital marketing may necessitate different localization processes. For instance, social media campaigns may need to be independently handled by your LSP’s local linguists based on your brief , as  there is no time for centralized content creation and subsequent translation. For websites and apps, a more time- and resource-intensive process such as transcreation would work better. Visuals as well as text may need to be re-created from scratch or tweaked, depending on how different the target market’s cultural and social practices and preferences are from that of the home market of the company.

Tools

When it comes to translation and localization tools, decision-making can get complex. Which tools you choose to work with depends on several factors such as:

 

  • The volume of content to be translated: this would directly impact the cost of the solution.

 

  • Your team structure: Through your LSP, you could skip or at least put off your investment in a tech solution, for the simple reason that you would be able to use their solutions. LSPs also have the capability to build plugins that will connect your content management systems such as WordPress, Sitecore, Claytablet, eZ Publish, etc., to their translation tools and processes. This enables seamless pushing of content as it’s created for translation, minimizing file transfers.

 

  • Your existing tech infrastructure and your overall global marketing strategy: These will influence all of the above in the sense that (a) your existing tech investments will determine what tools would be compatible and also feasible budget-wise and (b) how much control you require over your content, which markets you choose to enter and how fast, and other factors will influence many decisions regarding localization technology.
star

Successful global digital marketing requires all three elements – people, processes, and tools – to work together in harmony.

Remember that each element can influence the other. Hence, build resilient teams that collaborate with each other and understand the role and value of localization; recruit localization partners that understand your brand message and work to communicate it globally; institute processes that enable your international communication to be more effective, faster, and scalable; and work with tools that support the people as well as the processes involved in localization.

Vijayalaxmi Hegde

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What Makes Neural Machine Translation Work? Hint: Humans Have a Lot to Do with It

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Let’s say you are considering adopting neural machine translation (NMT) to speed up the rendering of your global content for different locales. As you may have heard, it’s a paradigm shift in MT technology. Among the many questions that are perhaps swarming your head, we try to answer a few in this post, such as: What makes NMT work? Can it be the panacea to all your translation troubles? Can it work on its own, without any human intervention? Can it deliver the quality you’re looking for?

Data is the backbone of NMT

An NMT engine can only be so good as the data it learns from. But unlike its predecessors such as statistical and rule-based machine translation, NMT learns on its own. That is, you don’t have to teach it word by word, phrase by phrase, or by grammatical rules. It learns from correlations in the data, employing methods such as transfer learning.

Alon Lavie, VP of Language Technologies at Unbabel, said on a podcast that we don’t have much control over what these systems are learning. Hence, it can learn un-intended stuff, too. He underscored the need to retain strong control over the translation process, particularly terminology. That makes it a no-brainer to involve professional linguists in the training process.

NMT engines do better with domain- and language-specific training. For instance, ecommerce engines trained in certain language combinations may do well in those domains and languages over generic engines, but may not perform the same way in other domains and languages. Hence it’s important to perfectly customize and continually fine-tune engines.

The role of humans in NMT

Data modeling improves NMT quality. This refers to the process of analysing the data and closely studying the impact of changes made to the data. Do the changes introduce a bias in the data? Is the NMT engine producing the desired quality after being trained on this data? When it does, you have a model. Data modeling needs to be done by linguist engineers who have experience working with MT. It is a critical task as it can influence the output quality hugely.

So, how does the work of these professional linguist engineers impact the functioning of the MT engine?

 

  • Firstly, one has to understand the limits of artificial intelligence (AI). Biases may be of many types. For instance, Forbes magazine wrote about how if one is using AI training sets to understand the ideal customer base for a game, the company may be led to believe that males in the age range of 15-34 would be the ideal targets. However, other age ranges or females may never have been marketed to by the company, hence producing an absence of data on those age or gender groups. In translation, too, the parallel corpora used for training NMT engines may have biases built in. Google Translate found that its NMT models reflected social biases such as those based on gender and led to biased translations: its engine had translated “He/she is a doctor” into the masculine form, and the Turkish equivalent of “He/she is a nurse” into the feminine form. Linguist engineers, from their experience in linguistics as well as language technology, are able to identify and correct such biases.

 

  • Secondly, they also look to disambiguate. That is, they train the system on how to differentiate, for example, between brand names and their commonly understood meanings. Many a time the machine is not able to tell between different accents, as is the case with the many variants of Spanish. Here, too, linguist engineers are needed to step in and guide the engine to make language- and culture-specific decisions.

 

  • When NMT experts manipulate the engine either to correct bias or any other element, they are able to measure the results of such manipulations. In the absence of such measurement, again, not only may erroneous translations be produced, but it will also be difficult how to trace the root of these errors. This means that working with NMT requires a virtuous circle of testing and improvements, and testing the impact of those improvements, and so on.

 

  • Linguist engineers understand your domain and how different language combinations work. They can fine-tune the engine for domain relevance, as well as fluency and coherence. This elevates the quality of output from that of a generic engine.

In sum, how good your NMT engine output is will depend on (a) the data that you feed it and (b) the professionals you hire to harness this data.

It’d be simplistic to think that once you switch on NMT, translation will happen without human intervention. True, NMT and other language technologies bring unparalleled capabilities to translation, but it still has to be human-enhanced to be of any value to us.

Vijayalaxmi Hegde

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When “Make Global Easy” makes sense

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Turnkey Multilingual eLearning Solutions

You are creating an innovative professional development policy for your staff.

Your training modules cover a range of subjects and feature technical deep-dives into areas relevant to your business operations, including HSE requirements such as Ethics, Compliance, Company Mission and Values, etc.

These training programs feature a variety of formats: video, text to speech, animation, and text—and they need to be accessed in all the countries in which you work. Your colleagues will buy into the program if—and only if—they can learn in their own language.

 

Example: Transportation and Logistics modules for Bolloré

3 Modules using specialized technical vocabulary in a cartoon format with more than 15 highly expressive characters.

 

Languages: French and English

Applications: Articulate 360

Lexcelera & Bolloré

An Alliance Designed for International Success

SOLUTIONS
  • Sourcing and preparation of all module assets to be localized.
  • Commissioning of a team of specialized linguists and a copywriter to ensure that content is casual, localized, and reproduces any wordplay in the original French (such as character names).
  • Selection of voiceover actors to portray the different characters.
RESULTS
  • Production of over three hours of completely localized online training for all Bolloré employees in the Transportation and Logistics divisions
  • Content published simultaneously in FRENCH and ENGLISH—a result of Lexcelera’s expertise in project coordination and project-based team collaboration.
  • Lexcelera’s total supervision of all localization and integration provided peace of mind to Bolloré management, allowing them to dedicate their time to the task at hand: the creation of new content.
Website Localization

You want international communications that are both consistent and adapted for local markets, and you want to be able to disseminate the content—which might be anything from the company website to the blog posts that draw people to it— to your regional marketing teams.

Regional management can then cherry pick the content that would appeal most to their market and send it to be localized and published on “local” sites, in local languages.

 

Example: Digital Marketing management, Essilor International

 

Languages: English to Danish, Finnish, Norwegian, Swedish (sites and articles); German, Swiss Italian, Dutch, and French (articles).

Application: eZ Publish

Lexcelera & Essilor

Masterful Multilingual Communications

SOLUTIONS
  • Sourcing of all website assets to be translated
  • Commissioning of a transcreation team (domain experts in ophthalmology and optometry and editorial specialists) for each language
  • Training of a Lexcelera integration engineer in the CMS
  • Localization
  • Systems integration and debugging
  • Language Sign Off –content proofreading before publication
RESULTS
  • Turnkey websites
  • Transcreation on demand: each region chooses the most appropriate/relevant local content
  • Simultaneous publication of articles in each commissioned language

L’article When “Make Global Easy” makes sense est apparu en premier sur Lexcelera.

On the fly and just-in-time translation of your digital content: existing solutions as of today

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Content comes in small packets today, either on social media or to support agile development. As companies look to release products simultaneously in all their markets, the turnaround time to translate content is typically a day or sometimes just a few hours. Are your translation processes and tools keeping up with the pace? 

You could choose from a couple of approaches to translate website content, depending on how fast the translations are required.

Translation proxy

It is a tech solution that has been around for some time and proven efficient in real-time translation of content as you publish it on the main website. This is how it works: when fresh content is created on the main website, a proxy grabs the new text and swaps it with translated text in the reader’s language on the regional or country site. The translations themselves come from either a machine translation (MT) engine or from translation memory (TM), that is, a store of previously translated sentences (or strings), or both.

Consider the following pros and cons before deciding on translation proxies:

 

  • The country sites essentially mirror the “mother” site. While this approach is great for content that can merely go through translation, it is not suitable for content that needs more adaptation like transcreation, or if you want to create fresh content for a country site.
  • Using a proxy also means that at some point you have to consider MT. Here you have more decisions to take regarding which MT technology to use: neural MT (NMT), statistical, rule-based, or hybrid. Other decisions are which MT vendor to choose, whether you are going to use MT for all language combinations, and what levels of editing you require for the MT output so that the translated content is on par with your quality standards.
  • You can also deploy professional, human translation within the proxy workflow, but note that fresh content yet to be translated will show up in the original language on the country site. It might result in a broken user experience.
  • When you choose a proxy solution for global communication, remember that you still cannot get human beings out of the way. Translation memories and MT output require the intervention of trained, experienced linguists and engineers for maintenance and operation. Translation memories can go bad if not looked after or if every project is being dumped into the same TM. Over time, terms may become obsolete, new ones may be added. Also, remember that translation memories feed into MT, so the quality of the MT output is hugely influenced by what you have in your TM.
Agile localization

In this approach, your LSP works as part of the product team from the get go. As a result, the LSP understands the product, the target audience, the locales for market entry, and quality requirements. Review and feedback processes are in place right from the beginning of the project to enable continuous translation. Everyone is clear on what level of quality is expected, so there is no room for subjective reviews. The LSP can also advise on practices to adopt to create global-ready content and set up internationalization processes, saving time and effort for everyone involved.

To make agile localization work, take the following steps:

 

  • Check if your LSP can provide follow-the-sun coverage or comprehensive coverage in the region you’re looking to operate in. Failing which, try to work out a translation schedule that matches your development cycle.
  • Agree on quality expectations and make sure they are not too high. If you are going to release your product in all the languages of the markets you are working in, it may not be possible to achieve perfect quality, should that exists. So, have clear benchmarks for quality. This reduces time spent on back-and-forth between the translators and developers.
  • Automate what you can. For instance, there is no room for manual handoff of files if you are to produce just-in-time translation. Explore what else can be automated fully or to some degree in the localization workflow.
  • Be truly agile, in the sense of being open and ready for changes that may be required of you as you progress.. Do not hesitate to try new fixes. Learning and knowledge sharing will save the team from last-minute firefighting.
Social media content

With social media increasingly influencing the purchase decision, you want to be sure you are present on all those platforms where your prospects hang out and are part of the conversation. Usually, your messages on social networks are highly personalized and often ultra-localized. So, translation simply doesn’t work in most cases. A more efficient way to work is to have near-autonomous in-country teams that your LSP can dedicate to your account.

Get your LSP on board while planning the social media campaign for different locales. Prepare a brief in which you set forth the target demographics, the messaging tone, and content formats you want to use. Make sure the in-country social media team understands the central idea of the campaign—they can then go ahead and tailor it to their locale and manage the daily running of the campaign.

The method you choose for instantaneous translation depends on your business priorities – how fast is fast enough, the type of content, the locales you are targeting – some audiences may be more quality-sensitive than others, and, of course your budget and organizational structure. It is going to cost more to translate quickly, at least initially when you are getting your teams, tools, and processes set up.

The level of autonomy you are willing to devolve to your local teams is another factor in enabling rapid translation – over-centralized corporate structures would make it difficult to pull this off.

Vijayalaxmi Hegde

L’article On the fly and just-in-time translation of your digital content: existing solutions as of today est apparu en premier sur Lexcelera.

Why being global is in fact being local

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We often read about how we must prepare for the global market and why it is important for success in international business, and so on. But have you ever wondered what or where is this “global” market? What are its constituents? And, how does one cater to it, if at all it exists?

The truth is there is no single global market. It is but a concept. In reality, what we call the global market collectively refers to many local markets. These markets may be situated in the same country as well as abroad.

Prepare for and cater to local markets

As there is no “global” market but several local markets, one cannot standardize, but one can and must localize. Prepare for each new market entry with as much care and effort as you would when releasing a product in your home market. This doesn’t mean, however, that you reinvent the wheel for each market. You can always build a set of localization best practices which can serve as a checklist for market entry as well as continued operation.

Create “Centers of Excellence” in globalization – yes, we’d still use that term for company-wide understanding of the purpose of the team – which will serve to document these practices and share knowledge.

The Globalization Center of Excellence can create and document a playbook for entering new markets. It acts as a repository of knowledge which various departments in the company can tap into and make use of.

Pick your “favorite” markets

When a company refers to its global market, it is in fact referring to the particular local markets it operates in. Hence, each company has to figure out which markets are important for it and accordingly localize. Even when companies operate in 50+ countries, they have or need to have a strategy tailored to each market. Sometimes, countries may get clustered into regions, as languages and cultures are shared.

In essence, don’t create a blanket solution for one market: instead, prioritize the local markets you want to operate and succeed in around the world and work on customized marketing and sales strategies for each.

Look beyond English

If there is no global market, it follows that English cannot be the key to global success. Even where it’s spoken widely as a second language, the preference will always be for the mother tongue language. Case in point: the Indian market or the European Union. Nine out of 10 Internet users from the European Union said they would prefer to visit a website in their own language, if they were to choose. Similarly, in India about a quarter of the country’s population speaks English, but their fluency varies and, again, when given a choice they would prefer to use their languages online.

Multilingualism is your first step in recognizing and adapting to the diversity of your clientele. However, it’s as much about customer inclusivity as much as it is about your own survival. If your business is to thrive, you want customers to find you. When your website or app does not turn up in search results when customers type the search query in their language, guess who’s losing out?

Think globally, act locally

What does this mean in the context of product development and marketing? Build a product that can be adapted to different locales. Do not assume your product is going to readily fit into most markets. You can do a couple of things to check for market fit: how is your industry sector doing in the country you are seeking to enter? Where are your competitors going? It’d be easier if you initially choose countries that speak the same language as in your home country and have similar economies. That is, if your product is for an emerging market, other emerging markets may be easier to penetrate.

In marketing, when you think global and act local, you create a central brand messaging, but you’re open to working with local teams for local execution. Be flexible and agile to understand and cater to your local market needs. Your partners such as language service providers (LSPs) can tell you a lot about what your local consumers prefer, in addition to helping you create an impactful message that resonates with them.

Why Lexcelera?

We are local in terms of how close we are to you and we are multi-local at the production level. This way, we are able to feel the pulse of the markets, tap into high quality professional resources, and create engaging brand communication. We are able to create original content in any language – this often makes an instant and deep connection with the target audience than translation can.

We believe this is a very effective way of catering to local markets, while still having a central, global vision of growth. This way, you can scale globally while succeeding locally.

Vijayalaxmi Hegde

L’article Why being global is in fact being local est apparu en premier sur Lexcelera.

EU Medical Device Regulation: Comply with translation before it’s too late

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If you make medical devices, you have some deadlines coming up: The European Union (EU) has asked companies to comply with its Medical Device Regulation (MDR) by May 26, 2021. There is also the In Vitro Diagnostics Medical Devices Regulation (IVDR), which will come into force from May 26, 2022.

In this article, we talk about the compliance measures that concern themselves with content and its translation. We also provide tips on how you can partner with a language company to take care of these compliance requirements.

Which devices will be affected?

All devices that currently have the CE certification need to be re-certified under MDR. All new devices that require the CE certification too have to be certified under MDR.

So, that means the MDR will touch many medical devices sold in the European Union such as lenses, x-ray machines, pacemakers, breast implants, hip replacements, and sticking plasters. In vitro diagnostic medical devices, which are used to perform tests on samples, include HIV blood tests, pregnancy tests, and blood sugar monitoring systems for diabetics.

How does content come into the picture?

The EU has placed great emphasis on transparency and accuracy in the MDR. This is to ensure patient rights and a better healthcare system. Hence, there is a need for more detailed descriptions, more languages, and more accessibility to the content.

The content types that come into focus for MDR compliance are:

 

Instructions for Use (IFUs)

  • IFUs for CE marked products will now have to match the stipulations of MDR. You need to check the IFUs against the new requirements, so you can fill in any gaps.
  • The patient information must state clearly the purpose of the medical device, and where applicable, what the clinical benefits would be.
  • For devices that will be inserted in the body, IFUs have to specify the materials used to make the device.
  • If a device is meant for lay users, IFUs have to include circumstances, if any, where they must consult with their doctors before using it.
  • The IFU must mention the expected life of the product and if any follow-up checks are required.

 

Summary of Safety and Clinical Performance (SSCP)

The SSCP is another critical document required by the MDR. It includes design verification/validation reports, the risk management report/file, the clinical evaluation report, and post-market surveillance (PMS), and post-market clinical follow-up (PMCF) plans and reports.

Content for the SSCP can be primarily derived from the IFU, where applicable. The SSCP of each device will be made publicly available on Eudamed, the European database on medical devices.

Why is translation critical for certification?

The entire IFU along with the updated content, the SSCP, and other technical documentation as required in the Annexes II and III will need to be translated in all the languages of the EU country where the product is to be sold. The information must be accurate and in plain language, to make it accessible to non-medical professionals. That is, any specialized content which may have medical jargon must be put into simpler words.

Any changes made to the device or documentation in one language needs to be reflected in each language the documents are available in. The Notified Body will validate the documents in one language.

For subsequent translations, the company can ensure quality in two ways:

  1. The company’s regulatory affairs department or counsel in each country will validate the translations.
  2. If there is no in-country counsel, the company can use a back translation process to ensure the translation is accurate. In this process, the earlier translation is translated back into the source language. This is then compared with the source content. The translation agency that back translates is different from the one that performs the translation.

 

A translation certificate is highly recommended to accompany the translated documentation when applying for certification.

If all the content required under the MDR is not translated in the languages of the country where the device will be sold, the device will not receive the CE certification. And, you will lose out in that market. That’s how critical translation is.

Best practices for compliance with MDR

A lot of new content needs to be created and translated to fulfil the different requirements of documentation. Here are a few best practices that make complying easier:

  • New terminology may need to be used to explain concepts to lay audiences. Use terminology management tools or work with multilingual content companies that already have one. This will help keep track of new terms being added, old terms that should no longer be used, explanations for the new terms, and so on.
  • The information in different language versions needs to be consistent. Invest in a quality management system to make sure there are no inconsistencies in translated versions.
  • Form teams within your organization that can oversee the process of creation and management of any new terminology or new content creation. Make sure the teams represent all stakeholders (regulatory affairs, marketing, research and development, etc.) as they would know their own requirements well.

 

Complying with the EU MDR and IVDR can bring additional benefits when you are entering another critical market: China. There are certain similarities in the classifications of medical devices in China.

China too requires manufacturers to translate all labelling and packaging text to Chinese. For Class II and III devices, documentation including product description, intended use, research data, manufacturing information, clinical evaluation data, product risk analysis data, and product technical specifications need to be submitted to the regulating authority.

So, the best practices you adopt to comply with the MDR can come in handy when entering China, too.

Choose translation partner with care

As every improvement or change to the product or its packaging would result in cascading content, translation is a process that life sciences companies have to integrate with their business processes. It’s not a one-time event any more. It’s a constant, continuous service that you will need.

It is all the more reason to choose your language partner with care, as it can make a difference between being able to sell in Europe or not. Keep in mind the below when selecting a multilingual medtech content company:

  • To begin with, your translation company must have experience in creating and managing multilingual content for medtech companies. It is highly recommended that they already have the tech infrastructure, especially terminology management and translation management tools as this will enable faster work. It must be familiar with regulatory requirements that relate to content, so that it can audit your content and advise you on gaps that need to be filled.
  • This process of assessing the content gap can be time-consuming, as it has to be done for all the patient manuals of CE-marked products. Very few life sciences content companies have content management systems (CMS) to systematically identify and fill the gaps. A CMS is critical in doing this as it saves a lot of time, maintains versions, and brings transparency.
  • The content company must have a solid, multi-level review process to meet the stringent requirements of MDR. This ensures that the required high levels of quality can be delivered. Clear channels of communication must be established for stakeholders, project managers, and translators. The review and feedback processes must be documented.
  • It must have an established system of managing the many language versions, so that changes or updates in the future can be quickly implemented across languages.

 

One thing is certain: there is no time to lose. A last-minute translation effort will lead to quality issues and auditors may reject your products.

These regulations make your product more accessible to the patient. Hence, it’s definitely an advantage in the market. So, start working on compliance as soon as possible.

Need help with a MDR project?

With production offices in Paris, Buenos Aires, and Bangkok, and commercial offices in London and Vancouver,

at Lexcelera, we’re available to deliver projects and answer questions 24/7—guaranteed.

Vijayalaxmi Hegde

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What can we learn about communications from Corona virus crisis?

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The year 2020 has been unlike any in recent human memory. Devastating as it has been, what can we seek to learn from the Covid-19 pandemic about communication?

The following practices are not only relevant to companies like Lexcelera that are in the business of communication, but also to every individual and organization. The need to communicate is universal and has become even more important and urgent this year.

And, while the pandemic is mainly about crisis communication, we can draw parallels from it to communication in more ordinary times, too.

Centralize content production and dissemination

Often, the content function in companies is spread out across departments. This can cause content to get trapped in silos. Harvard Business Review has talked about how content needs to be produced centrally, so it is accessible to all. Governments that followed this approach were successful in getting a unified message out fast.

However, companies that engage in global communication need to consider that local teams’ input and participation is critical in creating user-facing content.

Get your act together

Whether to fight a virus or to achieve effective global communications, there is no playing down the need to have a unified vision, to collaborate, and to cooperate. This is often lacking in big enterprises. The different business arms are not in sync with each other’s goals and processes. It can result in repetition of work, disparate content, inconsistent quality, avoidable costs, and finally a broken user experience.

A unified vision is key to such collaboration. Everyone in the company needs to be aware of the overarching goals and align their department’s as well as their own processes towards this goal.

In Germany, many hospitals shared data with a federal website which showed how much capacity they had. They also cancelled all elective surgeries to make room for Covid-19 patients. This way Germany’s hospitals ended up with extra capacity which they used to treat international patients. The understanding that we have to fight Covid-19 unitedly, irrespective of our nationalities, drove such action.

Don’t compromise on clarity

Health emergencies are a time when messages need to be communicated fast, but speed at the cost of clarity often makes the communication pointless. To take another example from Germany, virologist Christian Drosten’s podcast attracted millions of followers in the early days of the pandemic. He doesn’t dumb down the science. Instead, he shares complex ideas in an accessible way. He touches upon aspects of the virus that laypeople may not have understood well.

Avoid jargon in communication, especially when you are talking to non-specialist audiences. When you must use a difficult term, provide an explanation.

Translate or perish

As always, if not for translation, the messaging about corona virus and how to fight it would have remained locked in a few languages of the world. In the same way, your company’s brand messaging needs to reach all the markets in which it operates. This can only happen with translation. In a multilingual world, you simply don’t exist in the minds of your potential consumers without translation.

A lot of translation is about conveying critical information. For instance, instructions for use in drug packaging or for medical devices; user manuals of electrical instruments; and so on. Even weather information can be critical to fisherfolk.

Localize not only the content, but the formats

Translation goes hand in hand with localization. One of the to-dos in fighting against corona was to sneeze into a tissue and dispose it carefully. In many developing countries, everyone may not use a tissue. They may instead be in the habit of using a cloth napkin or hand kerchief. This might even be a better way as handling the used tissues itself may become an issue because the waste management capabilities of these countries are already over-burdened.

Hence, some audiences prefer more visual content than textual.

So, the message needs to be localized to suit the ground reality of the practices in different countries and provided in their preferred formats.

Similarly, localization involves every aspect of global content. From date, address, number, and time formats to the terms used by people in different countries to refer to your products, localization is critical at every step.

Understand the role of translation technology

Uji is Translators without Border’s first multilingual bot. It answers questions related to corona in Lingala, French, and Congolese Swahili and is set to learn more African languages soon. In a health emergency, speed, accessibility, and scale are all important. Improvements in translation technology for speakers of low resource languages will mean better participation and better health in emerging economies. This leads to the overall improvement of the world’s health as well as the economy.

The role of humans in the advancement of these technologies remains undisputed. Without linguists fine-tuning and training artificial intelligence systems, the latter’s ability to parse human languages would not have reached where it has today.

An understanding of this interaction between human and machine is necessary to see how communication will be shaped in the coming years.

Most importantly, empathy wins

The governments that have succeeded most in raising corona awareness have been the ones that have shown empathy and produced a coordinated response. Similarly, enterprises that understand and respond to user needs and cater to them consistently will achieve success in international business.

Need help with a project?

With production offices in Paris, Buenos Aires, and Bangkok, and commercial offices in London and Vancouver,

at Lexcelera, we’re available to deliver projects and answer questions 24/7—guaranteed.

Vijayalaxmi Hegde

L’article What can we learn about communications from Corona virus crisis? est apparu en premier sur Lexcelera.

Lexcelera joins the t‘works Group

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Lexcelera joins the t‘works Group

Paris, February 2021: The t’works Group has acquired Lexcelera, a language industry leader based in Paris, France, known for technology and service innovation.

While Lexcelera will become part of the t’works family, it will continue to operate independently under its current management and maintain its brand. The group will work together in strategically relevant areas such as technology, customer service, sales and quality management to strengthen and expand the brand’s offerings in the future.

 

“Along with the entire team here at Lexcelera, I am proud to be part of the t’works Group. We look forward to developing Lexcelera under the t’works umbrella and taking our brand and reputation to the next level.”

– Laurence Roguet, Managing Director at Lexcelera

 

“We believe that the addition of Lexcelera’s extensive expertise in machine translation technologies, strong and diversified customer base as well as experienced team will bring great value to the t’works Group.”

– Barbara Wohanka and Christian Enssner, Managing Directors at t’works

About Lexcelera

Founded in 1992, Lexcelera is a leading ISO 9001-certified international language services company headquartered in Paris with offices in the UK and Canada, operating in all time zones around the world. With a healthy dose of creativity and stringent quality requirements, Lexcelera takes leading companies’ communications strategy to the next level. Lexcelera coordinates and implements international communications plans for over 30 years, offering a wide range of multilingual services and high-performance tools. With its established network of experts covering 60 countries, Lexcelera offers a fast and round-the-clock global service.

About the t’works Group

t’works is a specialized translation services provider with 13 locations in Europe and North America and employs more than 190 people. The t’works Group and its companies, t’works Language Services, Enssner Zeitgeist, text&form, ASI and ProLangua, have focused on complex and individual language and translation services. The group covers a broad service portfolio consisting of translation, proofreading and post-editing, (software) localization (for SAP, among others), terminology management, layout work, interpreting, transcription, transcreation and language consulting.

t’works was advised by Rödl & Partner (Financial, Tax and Legal) and the selling shareholders by BCMS.

Contact

Laurence Roguet, 2 rue de la Roquette, 75011 PARIS

Phone +33 1 55 28 88 05

E-Mail: laurence.roguet@lexcelera.com

L’article Lexcelera joins the t‘works Group est apparu en premier sur Lexcelera.

EU Medical Device Regulation: Get it Right the First Time

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Last year, we wrote about the compliance measures listed in the European Union (EU)’s Medical Device Regulation that talk about content and its translation. The Regulation is entering into force today, May 26th.

Many medical device companies are scrambling to comply. However, as we see it, not all of them are getting the content part right. As a result, their applications often get rejected. They have not only lost time, but also the effort and resources spent on compliance.

Based on our experience of translation in the life sciences field, here are a few quick tips to help with MDR compliance.

Context is critical for quality

A word can have more than one meaning. As such, it can have more than one translation. The key to the most appropriate translation here is the context the word finds itself in. Seeing the context helps a translator understand how exactly a word needs to be translated, without prolonged back and forth.

So, when a client just throws bits of text over the wall, without providing the context, translators are working blind. This can often lead to errors. Please provide information about the product when you send the content for translation.

Many, many languages

The MDR stipulates that translations of Instructions for Use (IfU) and Summary of Safety and Clinical Performance (SSCP) be available in all 24 languages of the EU states. This is a huge undertaking. Hence, commensurate time and budget are required.

Also, please note that any change in the source/original text will need to be replicated in all the languages.

There needs to be company-wide awareness of these factors, to ensure the budget is in place and teams work together to produce the content on time for translation.

Optimize the process with the use of technology

Because of the scale of the project, using technology is essential to bring speed and greater efficiency. Computer-aided translation (CAT) tools are available to manage terms and translations.

You might be creating new terms or removing some old ones from your content in the interest of MDR compliance. A terminology management tool will help keep track of the terms updated or removed. It also serves as a place to store definitions of the term.

Translated phrases and sentences can be stored in a database for re-use later. This saves a lot of time and money when translating new content that might have the same phrases or sentences that have been translated earlier.

The multilingual content company you work with must also be experienced in the use of machine translation (MT) and post-editing. The MT engine needs to be trained for life sciences and fine-tuned for the language combinations you are working in. The output of the MT engine must be reviewed and edited by a trained MT editor, so that no errors remain in the published text. As this is medical device content, there is no room for errors.

Use plain language

This is the first step before translation, as it is about the source content. The MDR requires that the content must be easily understood by the user of the device. Else, your translations may still be rejected, regardless of the quality.

Write content in plain language, so that the subsequent translations are also easy to understand by a diverse audience. To write in plain language, the first requirement is that you know who the target audience is. Some devices are meant to be used by patients directly or sometimes by medical professionals and lay people. Children might be the intended audience. In that case, you might be writing for parents if the child is very young or directly to adolescents. When there are mixed audiences, you may have to create different versions of the text.

Partner with a language service company

For all the reasons listed above, working closely with a translation provider is critical to handle the documentation process from beginning to end. If the language service company is involved from the scratch, it will create the content in plain language and tailored to the health literacy levels of the audience. This not only makes the text simple enough to be understood, but makes translations easier, too.

Multilingual content companies can also advise on the use of technology and handle the project with attention to very small details. Their extensive domain experience and project management skills makes the whole process scalable and produces better quality.

If you are a medtech manufacturer with many product lines, document management becomes an ongoing and full-time task. Each time, there is an update to the product, the content has to be written according to the requirements of MDR and then translated in all the EU languages. You also need to maintain revision history for all the languages.

Clearly, translation is not an add-on task, but a critical business process. Partnering with the right language service company lets you concentrate on your core tasks and makes content management cost-effective.

partner
Why partner with Lexcelera?

We welcome the opportunity to work with you and bring your products to the EU market. We offer:

Years of experience working with medical device manufacturers.

Plain language communication to enable clear understanding of the product use instructions.

Use of technology to streamline and expedite the translation process, re-use content, and maintain consistent quality.

Extensive network of veteran linguists in all the major EU languages.

Round-the-clock coverage with offices in Paris, Buenos Aires, and Bangkok.

Vijayalaxmi Hegde

L’article EU Medical Device Regulation: Get it Right the First Time est apparu en premier sur Lexcelera.

Multilingual services for the luxury market in Europe

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Europe has been the home of many high-end fashion and luxury companies. Yet, in recent years it has not been the prime market for these companies, thanks to China and the United States. However, since the pandemic, there have been some strong signs that Europe has begun to gain back some of the prominence it used to command in this market.

The big question now is whether luxury companies understand the European customer and if they are ready to serve accordingly. A critical part of any company’s marketing effort is content. In this post, we’ll talk about why you need multilingual content to succeed in this market and how you can go about creating it.

Strongly multilingual

Europe is a multilingual market and its people are used to consuming goods and services in their own language. According to the Flash Eurobarometer of the European Union (EU), 90% of European internet users prefer to surf the internet in their own language. Though 55% at least occasionally use a language other than their own when online, 44% feel they are missing interesting information because web pages are not in a language that they understand.

Given such a strong preference for their native tongue, assess your own language-readiness in the markets you are operating in or wish to enter.

In countries that are traditional markets of high fashion such as France, Germany, Italy, and Spain, this preference for mother tongue is only stronger. While they may be mildly tolerant of English, you will be limiting your sales potential by not translating.

Dependence on brand recall and influencers

You may have put in a lot of effort and resources to build your brand. But are you expecting the world from it? Are you trying to make your brand work harder than it can? Same goes with the brand influencers or online influencers you might have recruited. They do represent the sprit of your brand, they are popular with the local audience, and they are doing their work, actually: they manage to get eyeballs and attention, drive people to your website or to download our app. And then, what happens?

Your potential customers are faced with a language other than their own. While the brand marketing or the influencer might have spoken the local language, your website and app don’t. It’s an epic disappointment for the visitor. It’s like a half-kept promise, neither here or there. Visitors will bounce off your website, leaving all your marketing efforts in the lurch.

Do not let your branding efforts or influencer appeal go to waste. Make the most of your marketing with translation. Make sure that you do not offer a broken language experience to visitors and miss a chance of converting them to customers.

Translation is worth it

Lexcelera helped a fast fashion company translate into 16 languages and doubled their sales. That is the power of translation. This is how it works: visitors feel comfortable enough to stay longer on your website/app and explore it. They begin interacting with your products, perhaps not just on the website/app, but also on social media. Thus begins a relationship. There is more trust, awareness, and familiarity which many a time leads to a purchase. Then there are recurring purchases, too, as they keep enjoying and interacting with your products.

Translation reduces time to market

Each season, as you launch your new collection, you want it to reach your patrons everywhere at the same time. If you already have a translation process in place, it’s easy to push the new content through these channels and get translated content. This way, the content is ready and available to support the new products. It does not have to be created afresh for each locale.

Scale up translation efforts

Perhaps you are already translating into a couple of languages. Which means, that you have a translation workflow in place. If you have invested in translation tools and are limiting your translation to just a few languages, think again. You are under-utilizing your investment in translation. Go ahead, maximize translation to maximize your presence in the European market.

Automate multilingual content creation

The world of translation tech has come a long way from doing translation in Excel sheets. You can use a translation management system (TMS) to create workflows depending on content type, language, or other categories. You can upload files that require translation and it will pass through the workflow to the designated linguists for translation and review. Alternatively, solutions are available that can pull fresh content from the source language website and push it to available translators, then take the translated content and publish it on the respective country websites.

Machine translation has gotten much better than what it was even a couple of years ago. The quality  level as well as the number of languages that MT can handle has grown. While it greatly speeds up the translation process, some content types may still need to be translated by professional translators. Or, the MT output may need a layer of editing to improve the quality. However, even with post-editing, as MT output editing is called, the amount of time saved is huge.

With the arrival of artificial intelligence (AI)-powered systems, translation management has become more intuitive, if you will. It learns from the changes or edits we make to the translations and subsequently translation quality improves. Thus, the editing effort gradually decreases.

Transcreate for some content types

Transcreation goes beyond literal translation. Some marketing copy, like homepage text or advertising campaigns, need this treatment. They can be based on the original message in the source language, but usually need to be completely re-written to suit the local audience. Website re-designs, including different graphics, might also be required. For transcreation, you need to work with an experienced language partner. They can determine the tone to be used for your visitors and even the right terms, which will suit them culturally and demographically, too.

Why partner with Lexcelera?

At Lexcelera, we have a keen understanding of creating high-quality multilingual copy for premium fashion and personal luxury brands. We use technology to bring better results to our clients on time, while continuing to work with professional translators. We also provide 24/7 coverage, with production offices in Paris, Buenos Aires, and Bangkok.

Transforming the retail process in the changing world

Are you thinking of extending and empowering your brand’s presence online? Then, this ebook is for you. In this ebook, we discuss how French luxury brands can strengthen their presence online and dominate e-commerce as they have done in the brick-and-mortar world of fashion and luxury.

Vijayalaxmi Hegde

L’article Multilingual services for the luxury market in Europe est apparu en premier sur Lexcelera.

What is e-learning localization?

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elearning

Let’s first look at what e-learning is and why it’s important. When companies do business internationally, their workforce, too, is global. While they can easily train their employees at headquarters through in-person sessions, the logistics of doing so at the global level becomes a little complex.

What is e-learning localization?

Enter e-learning, which allows companies to train their staff based anywhere in the world and bring them up to speed on the latest practices and rules and regulations in their industry as well as in the company. It helps in onboarding new employees quickly so that they become conversant with the workflow and start contributing to the team’s efficiency.

E-learning gives companies a lot of freedom and creativity in how they can design their training program and implement it. It also saves a lot of time and money for companies that would otherwise be spent on travel, accommodation, and other logistics.

The training program can be delivered completely online or in conjunction with any offline classroom sessions.

It can be asynchronous, meaning the student can take the course at their own pace. Or, it could be run according to an established schedule.

The content can be fixed and all the students take the same course, or it can be adapted to the needs of the individual learner. The program can also be designed to be interactive, allowing the student to communicate with the teacher.

E-learning localization

E-learning localization is the process through which the training program is rendered in the language of a specific locale and tailored to the students’ requirements. Consequently, it is more than just translation.

A well-localized training program takes care of many smaller details such as the right currency, date and time format, culturally acceptable themes, images, colors, body language, and so on. It does not in any way feel alien to the learner.

A training program includes text, user interface (UI) elements, video and audio, and different interactive elements. To localize it seamlessly, many different professionals have to come together: translators, editors, reviewers, project managers, subtitlers, dubbing professionals, and of course, developers.

Trends in e-Learning

Some irreversible trends have entered the e-learning industry. Being aware of these trends will help you build engaging learning content.

1. Mobile learning (M-learning). Learning on the go is here to stay, as more and more learners prefer to take courses on their mobile. Responsive design, hence, becomes mandatory.

2. Micro-learning. The ever-shorter attention span, not wanting to add further to the employee‘s to-dos, and taking up less memory space on the device are all factors that have spurred micro-learning. But this doesn‘t mean that you take the existing content, chunk it up, and serve it separately. Micro-learning means that you create small learning nuggets that are complete in themselves but are also connected with a larger theme.

3. Increased accessibility for all online learners. Some accessibility features such as transcripts and narration tools are great for every learner, regardless of any disability issue.

4. Gamification or game-based learning: Incorporating games into e-learning increases retention and learner performance. It adds fun to the learning experience and provides a sense of satisfaction upon completion of tasks and levels. It reduces distractions during learning.

5. Personalized learning: Learning is becoming highly individualized and interactive through the use of artificial intelligence (AI).

6. Virtual conferences: They have gained traction during the pandemic but have developed into a trend that is unlikely to go away as they are very convenient and save travel time and organization costs. If invitees are unable to attend, they can always turn to the recording.

7. Collaborative e-learning: It promotes interaction and facilitates networking.

8. Video-based training: Most people watch videos on their smartphones. Take advantage of this habit and deliver your learning content via video. Video learning allows the student to be in control of the pace. It engages the learners better. Learners can also be encouraged to create their own videos and upload them on a common learning platform.

Creating multilingual and multicultural training

Localizing a training program for employees around the world comes with certain challenges.

Vijayalaxmi Hegde

L’article What is e-learning localization? est apparu en premier sur Lexcelera.

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