How to use Lingohub's translation tools most effectively?

Our blog often talks about localization into multiple languages and how this process can be challenging and puzzling. Today, we introduce you to Lingohub's translation features, which could be the missing piece for a successful process and will turn your localization to a new level. Let's overview the main Lingohub tools, their ability, and their practical use.

Style guides

Style guides are a huge advantage in involving your target audience better and correctly addressing them. They provide settings for often overlooked details of localization.

With style guides, you define standards for translators to follow when translating your text segments. They ensure the consistency of the translations within all the projects in which they are used. It is up to you to - create just one style guide for general use or several style guides for different customers, projects, or audiences. In total, you can set up the following categories:

• Category (traveling, e-commerce, economy, etc.)
• Audience: Set the age range of your target audience, e.g., children or adults.
• Literal translation: Receive translations with literal meaning or use a cultural, conversational, or neutral style.
• Vocabulary type: Request fictional, popular, or technical vocabulary use.
• Grammatical person: Define the grammatical person translators must use, e.g., third-person feminine.
• Formality: Choose between formal or informal translations.

Style guides save time. They provide translators and other participants of the localization process with all the necessary information upfront and reduce queries. Additionally, you can tailor your translations to best suit your target audience. Style guides enable you to involve your target audience better and correctly address them.

Note: It's not just translators who can utilize style guides. It would be best if your marketing, sales, and other customer-related departments had the same vision about how to talk to the specific audience. Such an approach will guarantee that your business speaks the same tone of voice throughout every step of customer involvement.

Quality checks

Quality checks are the best friend of QA's and the people responsible for the final approval. They keep your projects' translations within predetermined criteria and notify you at once whenever deviations are from the defined rules.

With the quality checks, you're able to check for the following:

• the correct usage of terms;
• length quality - you can define how long or short should be text in some segments;
• spaces checks - will notify you in case of missing or additional spaces;
• missing or unnecessary placeholders';
• missing or unnecessary HTML tags;
• duplication checking - to avoid the repetitive text;
• changes in only specified HTML tags;
• the number of line breaks between your source and target language.

As you can see, quality checks could be excellent support for quality assurance. It will help avoid common or human mistakes. For instance, your translated files will always have the correct markup, placeholders, HTML, etc., protecting you from issues during the file implementation. Take a look at the example below to see how quality checks define the missed placeholder.

Term bases

With term bases, you can define and lock specific translations for specified words or mark them as untranslatable. Term bases ensure consistency for your translations and can be checked with quality checks. See the example below:

You can also store brand-related text segments and assign specific term bases to projects. Alternatively, you can use just one term base and store your specified words there. Term bases can be as flexible as you need them to be. Add entries manually or import them from a CSV or TBX file, create as many term bases as you need, and connect them to specific projects. For each term, you can set the following:

• Case sensitivity - you can choose when the term base provides a suggestion based on the case. For example, you can set up that the word "Apple" shouldn't be translated, while "apple" would be.
• Translatable: Allow this term to be translated or not. This is great for brand names and other terms that should be kept in their original writing.
• Translations: If the term is translatable, you can specify how the term should be translated for all your target languages. Image: Add the visual information to help your translators understand the context better.
• Description: Add a description to your entry so colleagues and translators can learn more about it and have more context.
• Advanced information like context, usage status, part of speech, term type, etc.

When you send your translations to an external translator, you can simply add your term base to the order. This ensures that even translators from outside your company adhere to your corporate wording. This improves the consistency of overall projects. Gone are the times when your text segments are translated differently in multiple projects.

Translation memory

The translation memory is every translator's best friend. With several matches displaying similar or identical content, translators can easily stay consistent with previous translations.

Lingohub provides translation memory with two types. The first is a virtual translation memory that automatically memorizes and stores all your previous translations. It learns in real-time from your projects. The second option is file-based translation memory, which can be created based on your uploaded files.

The main goal of this tool (no matter which type you have chosen) is to provide translators with up to three suggestions based on past translations. You can set up one default translation memory, which will be used organization-wide, or assign multiple translation memories to different projects. The translation memory will automatically be assigned to new projects and can be used to prefill empty segments.

Machine translations

The Lingohub machine translation feature provides the combined power of DeepL, Google Translate, and Amazon Translate engines. While it cannot replace professional translators, machine translations can be a great starting point for your team, and avoid starting the work from scratch.

Note: There are a few scenarios where you can use translating engines to speed up the localization. The first one - prefill with machine translation. All empty segments can be automatically filled, so you do not need to apply the machine translation to each manually. The second one uses a combination of machine translation + prefill + Figma plugin to test the new translations in the graphical interface.

Translation history

If you changed your translation but want to see or restore one of the previous - Lingohub has a solution - the translation history. It collects the text segment's translation and shows the latest three in the editor side panel. You can roll back the changes and control who approved the text and made edits in one click.

Conclusion

Lingohub's translation tools have got you covered. Independent of how you translate your text segments through internal or external translators, Lingohub offers you all the tools to stay consistent. You can use style guides and term bases to store information about your target audience and brand. In addition, suggestions from the translation memory and machine translation help with translations. Quality checks complete the package as a robust quality assurance assistant.

Are you not using Lingohub yet? Try it out; it's entirely free for 14 days, and all features are available during your trial. Feel free to book a demo or reach out to us anytime. Simply contact our support.