Marketing content has been widely digitized all over the world to make it available to every type of consumer. While a majority of this content is still in English, the need to localize the content language and make it understandable for all readers continues to grow. Translation and localization are becoming more and more essential to international marketers. The old year is drawing to a close, so it’s time to stop and contemplate the newest translation and localization trends for 2020.
1. Rapid Adoption of Multilingual Customer Support
Customer grievances are important for every business to handle. This aspect of customer support becomes more complicated when a company’s customer base is global and multilingual. Increasing globalization brings with it more competition making it more important than ever for companies to retain their customers, which lands this at the top of our localization trends. It’s a fact that retention of old, loyal, and paying customers is less costly than striving to acquire new ones, so multilingual customer support is crucial. Support in the local language assists international companies to cater to their customers’ issues much more seamlessly. Grievances are resolved more quickly and employee productivity is increased. Multilingual customer support should extend to the knowledge base, online communities, forums, real-time chatbots, ticketing systems, etc.
2. Transcreation Will Be on the Rise
Transcreation hasn’t quite picked up pace yet, but 2020 seems like a good year for it to do so. More and more companies are becoming global and are realizing the importance of making their international target customers feel valued and comfortable. This is where transcreation comes into play. Content needs to be transcreated so that the text reads as if it was originally written in the target language and not just translated from another language. The languages that are increasingly being successfully transcreated are French, Italian, German, European Spanish, Simplified Chinese, Brazilian Portuguese, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Turkish, Malay, Hindi, and Polish.
3. Increased Reliance on Domain Adaptive Neural Machine Translation (NMT)
Based heavily upon artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning, translation and localization services will embrace increased usage of domain adaptive NMT. Domain adaptive NMT builds upon baseline models or datasets as opposed to standard NMT, which relies on frameworks. Thanks to AI, the learning process is automatic and the amount of computing time is lowered. With the rise of AI-based models, the translation and post-editing of content will increasingly rely on machine learning models.
4. Translation and Localization Will Increasingly Extend to Video Content
With the increasing importance of video marketing, 2020 will see a rise in the translation and localization of video content. This is already taking place with companies whose principal business is video streaming of content, e.g., Netflix and Hulu. These companies have incorporated subtitles and dubbing in multiple languages to cater to a global audience. Moreover, this will extend to e-learning, informational videos, and online webinars, where content will increasingly be streamed to a multilingual audience leaving everyone to follow this localization trend.
Final Thoughts
In a rapidly changing business world, it is wise to adapt your business model to cater to a global customer base. One such way to go about it is via the translation and localization of your marketing content. Reach out to Localize for assistance in reaching your target customers in whichever country they live in and boosting your international business in 2020 with these localization trends.
