Why is context important in localization?

You will always recognize the worldwide popular brands when you visit other countries. Unique styles, colors, messages, and fonts tell you, "Hey, you know who I am." All their marketing campaigns and central values stay consistent during different world regions and decades. By looking at the brand's social media and blog and reading their emails, you can feel that the same team or even person has produced all the content through the years. 

You should always give your team enough context to reach the same content quality in your business. Exactly context is a weak side for all machine translation tools and doesn't allow localizing the content automatically, that, as a result, requires constant human including. During the localization process, not only the translators should go deeply into the project's peculiarities, but developers and designers as well. This article will overview the importance of context information for the main localization teams and how to provide it to them in the best and shortest way. 

Example of context importance

Translators can make huge mistakes without context information. A simple example is the word "back" - without context, it can be translated as an action - to go (to the previous page) or as a part of the body. Or, one more example - the word "cookie" can be understood as a bakery or a small piece of web data. 

The context for developers

Thinking that the tech team can be only partially included in the localization is wrong. Of course, developers' main tasks are developing something new and supporting product availability, but providing additional information besides the technical requirements is necessary to localize the product successfully. The primary needed information during localization for developers are:

• Local law regulations (about security, data collecting, etc.)
• Technical conditions. Developers must ensure their code supports all requirements, like characters encoding and fonts. 
• Nuances like date and time format, figures used, correct calculation, etc. 
• All new external systems you want to integrate into the project 
• Familiarity with the translation management system for files back and forth.
• Etc.

Because the developers closely work with the file exchange and strings, they need continuous communication with the team to approve something or request a content fix in case of errors. With Lingohub, developers can leave the comments and instructions for the text segments in the resource files. The managers and translators will see all the comments in the Lingohub editor UI, so all important remarks will be taken into account.

The context for designers

With a high probability, your design will undergo changes during the localization. Different language directions, word lengths, and other peculiarities require updating layouts or, sometimes, creating new ones from scratch. In this process, context is a crucial part that allows adapting visual materials and makes them appropriate and effective. A combination of text and design conveys the message to your target audience and represents the product/service on the market. To support your design team and get an expected result, provide the following information:

• The audience portrait. Your target audience may change from market to market, influenced by sociocultural factors. The designers' team should know as much information as you collected about user profiles.
• Cultural nuances. All about colors, symbols, and permitted and restricted things (like photos of people in products for Arabian countries are a bad idea.) You will resonate with the target audience by taking care of these nuances. 
• Pre-translated texts. In the process of designing, using machine translation raises the effectiveness. The team does not need to wait for all translated text and can work in parallel with others. This approach will reduce the number of edits in the future and allow you to fit content from the start. 
• User feedback. Providing the design/marketing teams the ability to do A/B testing or create surveys to confirm hypotheses is another significant part of understanding if you are going the right way. 

The context for translators.

You can work with your internal team or hire someone external (agency or freelancers.) Both options are appropriate but require the same approach - providing the context and a single source of trust. Let's overview detailed which information can be helpful and valuable in localization:

• Overall tone. How does your business talk to different customer groups (formality, grammatical person, type of vocabulary, etc.)?
• What is the current project about? Which additional values does your business want to highlight and bring to the new market?
• How will the text be placed inside the new layouts, and how will the design change? To this point, we can refer to the requirements for text length for specific parts.
• Description for unclear project parts. An example, if you have placeholders that the specific text should replace or other technical aspects that can confuse linguists, the best practice is to provide all the needed information at the start. 
• Terms spelling. Correctly using the proper names, titles, etc., tremendously support translators' and managers' time by preventing issues.

So we listed a lot of information that should always be in the hands of your localization teams. From the first eye, combining all these things conveniently and quickly for finding can be challenging. But not with Lingohub. 

How does the Lingohub support context providing?

We provide a list of tools that support our customers and their teams with a deep understanding of the project and convenient data collecting and sharing. With the Lingohub editor context panel, you can find all the information relevant to the segment, an example, the segment description with specific details. Besides the context panel, you can use the following:

Style guide

Describe your target audiences - industry, country, age range, etc., and provide examples of how to talk with them. The style guide can be a source of trust that will support not only translators but the marketing and sales team and ensure the consistency of your business voice. 

Term base

Forget about incorrect proper names or other words' spelling. The Lingohub term base suggests the correct option when recognizing the entries just during the translation process. If you have untranslatable terms, you can also specify them.

Context images

The best way to understand text usage is to see how it will be placed on the prototype. With Lingohub, managers can automatically (via Figma plugin or API) upload the context images for the segments or add them manually. The translator from his side will see the context image inside the editor context panel.

Quality checks

It is not an easy task to specify every time some requirements for text segments, an example, the min and max length for buttons. To automate this task, you can use the quality checks feature developed to reduce manual text checking and provide predeterminate rules for teams.

Segment description

Each text segment has related information (context images, labels, etc.) - one is a description. The translating team can add details about the text segment that will be visible to the entire team.

Conclusion

Context is one of the essential things for accurate and high-quality localization, but coordinating all the information and sharing it with the localization team can be challenging. 

Using Lingohub, you can be sure that all permitted team members can quickly find all the needed information or get it automatically. Schedule a quick demo with our team if you need more information about how it works and how Lingohub can support your business in the localization process. We will gladly help you!