Keeping up to speed is a must for brands in modern times, and traditional translation methods are no longer up to the challenge.

Batch processing large volumes of content and dealing with delays lead to high costs and missed opportunities. Companies need to update their content in real-time in order to stay competitive, and the answer lies in continuous localization.

Unlike traditional methods, continuous localization supports real-time updates, ensuring localized versions are always in-sync with your core content. This agile approach provides a faster time-to-market, and significant savings for brands.

In this article, we’ll dive into the benefits and challenges of continuous localization, explore best practices, and showcase the tools needed to optimize your strategies. Grab yourself a coffee, and let’s get started!

Why Continuous Localization Matters in Agile Development

Agile development has revolutionized the way businesses create and deliver software products. Cross-functional collaboration and rapid feedback cycles enable companies to respond quickly to changing market demands, reduce risks, and deliver value to customers in a faster timescale.

Let’s see how continuous localization fits into the agile development process:

• Iterative development: Continuous localization supports the iterative nature of agile working by ensuring that all new features and updates are translated and localized in real-time.
• Feedback loop: A continuous feedback loop between developers and localization teams helps address any issues promptly, ensuring consistency across all languages.

• Bringing processes together: Continuous localization brings development and localization processes together, improving efficiencies and reducing time to market.
• Consistent quality: Integrating localization tasks into daily workflows allows for immediate corrections and improvements, maintaining high-quality translations throughout the development process.
• Enhanced collaboration: A continual process enables better collaboration between development, quality analysis, and localization teams, leading to more cohesive and efficient workflows.

• Reducing delays: By integrating with Continuous Integration/Continuous Delivery (CI/CD) pipelines, continuous localization automates repetitive tasks and optimizes resource allocation, reducing the bottlenecks commonly experienced when using traditional methods.
• Cost efficiency: An agile approach reduces the need for rework and any downtime required between development and localization phases.

Key Benefits of Continuous Localization

Let’s now explore two of the most significant benefits of continuous localization: speeding up time to market and enhancing product quality.

Speeding up Time to Market

Continuous localization supports the simultaneous release of products and updates across multiple markets. By integrating localization into the development process, companies can ensure a consistent user experience worldwide, regardless of language or location. This is particularly important in today’s marketplace, where users expect instant access to products and services in their native language.

Moreover, continuous localization aligns perfectly with agile development cycles, allowing for rapid iterations and faster delivery of new features and products. By eliminating any bottlenecks caused by localization, teams can focus on developing and releasing new offerings without being held back by lengthy translation processes.

Enhancing Product Quality

By ensuring that translations are always up-to-date with the latest product versions, brands can maintain cultural relevance across all markets. Users are more likely to engage with high-quality content, and as we know, engagement inspires sales, return visits, and customer retention.

Integrating a localization strategy into the development process also minimizes the risk of errors that require costly post-release corrections. By catching and addressing any issues early on, teams can avoid the need for expensive and time-consuming fixes down the line.

Tools like Weglot offer the best of both worlds by combining automated translation with human post-editing. This approach ensures both speed and translation quality, allowing businesses to scale their localization efforts without sacrificing accuracy or cultural nuance. We’ll take a closer look at Weglot's features later on!

Case Study: The Bradery

The Bradery, a French ecommerce brand, needed a scalable translation solution for their 500+ daily product launches. By using Weglot, they saved time by automating translations for their English and Spanish sites, needing to spend just 10 minutes twice a week on content checks. With 110+ languages available, Weglot also allowed them to easily test new languages like Dutch and Italian.

By using continuous localization through Weglot’s automation, The Bradery was able to keep up with its high volume of products, launch new languages with one click, and expand into new markets with minimal manual effort from their team. Without Weglot, launching such a high number of products in multiple languages would simply have been a physical impossibility.

Continuous Localization: Best Practices

Be sure to include the following to give your continuous localization efforts some real impact:

• Design for internationalization (i18n): A vital consideration is to consider localization from the early stages of software development. This includes designing codebases that support multiple languages and regional formats.

• Foster real-time communication: Real-time communication platforms like Slack or Microsoft Teams enable team members to collaborate and resolve problems quickly. It’s also important to secure stakeholder buy-in, ensuring that everyone is on board with the project and its goals.

• Integrate with a Translation Management System (TMS): Integrating with a TMS like Weglot can further optimize localization workflows. A TMS provides a centralized platform for managing translations, collaborating with translators, and automating tasks. Weglot’s integrations enable website owners to manage localization projects from a single dashboard, making the process efficient and user-friendly.

Overcoming Challenges in Continuous Localization

While continuous localization offers numerous benefits, it also presents several challenges for brands. Let’s explore the main hurdles and how to overcome them.

Maintaining Translation Consistency

Ensuring consistency across all translated content is a major challenge, especially when dealing with multiple languages and large volumes of content. Inconsistencies can lead to confusion and potentially offend customers, damaging your brand’s reputation.

The best translation management tools address this issue by incorporating a translation memory and glossary. Weglot’s translation management system stores previously translated segments for reuse, improving consistency across all content. This approach combines the efficiency of machine automation with the accuracy of manual work, allowing businesses to deliver quality translations at scale.

Managing Real-Time Updates

Continuous localization demands real-time updates, which can strain resources and complicate workflows. The constant flow of new content requires an organized system to manage translations efficiently.

Implementing automated workflows and integrating with CI/CD pipelines is the most effective solution. Automated tools accelerate the process and reduce manual intervention, ensuring your translations keep pace with content updates.

Weglot’s automatic content detection and continuous translation features are designed to manage real-time updates efficiently. These integrate with existing workflows, minimizing disruptions and ensuring that all new content is quickly detected and translated. This approach allows businesses to maintain up-to-date translations across all of their content with far less need for manual input.

Ensuring Cultural Relevance

As we’ve seen, merely translating words is not enough – content needs to connect with your target audience on a cultural level, reflecting linguistic preferences and local nuances.

Weglot supports this method by allowing human translators to refine machine translations, ensuring local relevance. Our platform’s Visual Editor enables businesses to make language-specific adjustments directly on the page, so you can see how translations fit into your existing designs. This ensures your multilingual web pages match the design standards found on your core site and look attractive to your overseas audience.

Streamlining Collaboration

Coordinating between different teams involved in the localization process – developers, translators, project managers – can be complex and lead to inefficiencies. Miscommunication or delays in one area can have a ripple effect on the entire project.

The solution lies in integrated translation management tools that enable collaboration and communication. Centralized platforms for managing localization projects can improve workflow efficiencies and reduce any misunderstandings.

Weglot excels in this area with its user-friendly dashboard and real-time collaboration tools, as this user testifies:

"We searched high and low for a seamless website translation solution that offered high-quality, automatic output, an intuitive interface, and easy editing. Weglot ticked all the boxes."

– Federico Coccia, Co-Founder, EditStudio Agency

Controlling Costs

Continuous localization can be expensive, particularly when scaling to multiple languages and regions.

To control costs, businesses can optimize the use of machine translation with human post-editing. This approach balances cost and quality, combining the efficiency of automated translations while ensuring accuracy through human review.

Weglot offers a cost-effective solution by taking the hybrid approach. A machine and manual translation model enables businesses to scale their localization efforts while keeping costs to a minimum. High-quality translations can be achieved, without losing control of your budget!

How Weglot Supports Continuous Localization

Weglot is an automatic website translation plugin with a comprehensive set of features designed to support continuous localization:

• Easy integration with all major platforms allows businesses to quickly implement multilingual pages with no technical knowledge.
• Automatic content detection and continuous translation ensure that any new or updated content on your website is immediately detected and translated.
• Translation management tools for collaboration and project management. Weglot’s translation management dashboard gives you complete editing control to all your translations. Choose to add teammates or translators to your project to edit and approve translations, create translation rules, exclude certain pages from translation, and so on. You can also order professional translations directly inside Weglot. A centralized platform results in better workflows, with admins able to oversee entire projects without having to log-in to multiple screens.
• Translation memory and glossary.
• Multilingual SEO support includes language-specific URLs, automatic hreflang tag implementation, metadata translation, and a choice of subdirectories or subdomains.

By using our plugin to manage your localization projects, you’ll be able to collaborate with external partners through a centralized dashboard. Bringing the project under one roof improves efficiencies throughout the process, reducing timescales.

Combining machine translations with human refinement ensures a high quality end result. And our translation memory uses AI to learn language preferences, improving consistency across your website.

Weglot effectively addresses the ongoing challenges of continuous localization. Its ease of use, automation capabilities, and multilingual SEO make our platform ideal for businesses from ecommerce and corporate websites to travel, education, news, non-profit, and SaaS companies.

“When trying to reach a global audience, effective translation is a must-have – how else can you connect with different cultures and position your brand to meet their preferences? The Weglot empowers businesses to speak the language of their customers, wherever they are in the world, building trust and driving growth on a truly global scale.”

– Augustin Prot, CEO of Weglot

Next Steps to Implement Continuous Localization in your Organization

Continuous localization is a savvy tactic for global businesses and those aiming to expand internationally. The process ensures that your content remains up-to-date and culturally relevant across all markets, improving the user experience and driving growth. And by allowing your development and localization teams to work in-sync, you can ensure everything is covered from the very start of a project.

Dedicated software is essential for effective continuous localization. Weglot’s website translation  solution offers automatic content detection, CMS integration, a translation memory, glossary, and multilingual SEO capabilities . Through Weglot you can stay agile in your localization efforts while ensuring high-quality translations throughout.

Accelerate your localization efforts and take the next step in your expansion journey by trying Weglot today with our 10-day free trial!