What Is Continuous Localization and How

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By Rahul Pandey

Does It Work?

International brands have to deal with plenty of translation work on a regular basis.To keep the content delivery fast and uninterrupted, you can integrate your translation with software development- this is what you call continuous localization.

Brands have to focus more on agility factors to cope with the fast-paced digital world. Considering the significance of software localization for your brand, you have to keep the process real quick to continuously deliver your product to a global customer base. To achieve speed and agility in your localization processes, you integrate the localization workflow into your product development life cycle. It can reduce your time to market the product to the global marketplace. To make continuous localization happen, you must have the right plan in place and use a best localization platform.

Continuous Localization – Introduction 

It’s a process of integrating your localization workflow into the product development lifecycle that results in continuous translated content delivery. Instead of waiting for the product development to complete and localize the existing processes, project teams start working on product localization side by side product development teams.

Unlike traditional ways of product localization, the purpose of continuous localization is to establish an agile product development cycle where developers and translators work beside each other. This way, you are able to complete your localization faster, and your localization teams become less frustrated.

How Does Continuous Localization Work?

The idea of continuous localization aims to integrate your localization with product development. So your product is ready to be delivered as soon as the product life cycle is completed. Developers don’t have to wait for days, so the product is localized and tested by the quality assurance team. Similarly, translators don’t have to wait for the completion of product development; they can start working on the localization and translation aspects parallel to development teams.

To make the continuous localization workflow work for your product, you may need to train your team about the continuous flow of things that they have to maintain simultaneously. When your localization processes are uninterrupted and agile, it allows you to work on obstacles instantly as they appear.

Simply put, you are putting anyone on hold to wait while other teams are working. Everyone is monitoring and managing everything simultaneously. This leads to a continuous and agile localization process with no delays or disruptions. It’s an agile, effective, and time-saving way of coping with your product development and everything else that goes around it.

Key Advantages of Continuous Localization

Continuous localization brings out the true essence of team collaboration because everyone is closely working with each other. Translators have to team up with developers to integrate software development and localization processes. It is a more holistic approach to achieving your business goals in the global marketplace.

To keep the localization flow going, translators have to take part in a business meeting with another department to get some understanding of their work as well.

Better Quality 

You make localization an integral part of the software product development cycle through integrations. It brings different product teams together to work towards a common goal that reduces the chances of communication gaps and conflicts. Adopting this holistic approach toward product development and localization improves the quality of outcomes. It eliminates the chances of errors and enables teams to ensure the effectiveness of software products both functionally and linguistically.

Shorter Product Cycles

Global companies are always looking for ways to reduce their product development cycles, which allows them to release their product more quickly to their customers. Through continuous localization, businesses can shorten their product release and content delivery durations. Especially in this age of high consumerism, and immediate gratification, it is important for companies to design shorter and faster product cycles to get maximum revenue.

Reduced Time to Market

Once your software product is complete, the product release is delayed for weeks and months for localization purposes. It wastes a lot of time and cost and directly affects your profit margins. Using a professional enterprise translation solution or a localization platform is also helpful in reducing your product time to market. By doing this, you can automate your localization workflow in parallel to software development to save more time and cost.

Seamless Teams’ Collaboration

Continuous localization is a good approach to promote effective collaboration between different product teams. It allows the developers, designers, and translators to work together on a single software product simultaneously and achieve higher work efficiency. When all teams are working closely with each other, it helps them understand the work constraints other teams have. For instance, translators would get to know deeply about the impact of UI design and context on the overall software user experience. It allows the translators to create in-context translations keeping in mind the design and layouts of the software.

Final Say

Summing up the discussion, we can say that continuous localization is a great approach used by global companies to constantly deliver quality products in the market. Unlike traditional product development processes, in the case of continuous localization, you will be saving more money and time. Faster time to market increases customer loyalty and also significantly improves your software ROI. For the successful execution of your continuous localization plan, you can invest in buying a professional language service provider platform or get a reliable enterprise translation solution.