The range of new media assets available is exciting and beneficial for capturing a broad consumer base, but can pose challenges when ensuring your localization process ramps at the same speed. When a company introduces a product to global markets, the associated content must be localized for each market. For many companies, this means taking digital media assets -- such as ad templates, HTML email templates, videos, or ActionScript files -- and localizing them.
Not surprisingly, localizing and managing distribution of rich media assets presents numerous challenges. Rich and digital media by definition feature an interactivity that makes them dynamic and also has a ripple effect in change management. Each component sets a constraint upon the others -- from space, to graphics, to audio, to delivery platform -- and each change affects the constraints of another component. However, rich media can be made accessible if all the elements are developed with global markets and accessibility in mind. Consider the following when integrating the following digital media assets into your global campaign.
Flash is often a go-to tool for creative design and versatile usage. To ensure fewer headaches when localizing, make sure that all of your on-screen text is easy to extract for translation by having it in an external XML file, or at the very least making sure complete phrases are located within the same text fields. It may be fun and easy to make one letter at a time fly onscreen with a special effect in English, but trying to add those single letters back into a German word with three times as many letters for the same word can be troublesome. Adding to this complexity are animation timings that fire when certain words in a sentence enter. When the sentence structure of your Asian characters is completely different than the English, all of those animations have to be re-timed with a native speaker's input unless your content was originally developed with this idea in mind. Also keep in mind that for right-to-left languages like Arabic and Hebrew, any flying text animations would usually need a change of direction.
Voice is another attention-grabbing way to capture your audience. Ensure that you always keep an up-to-date version of your English script so you don't have to have it transcribed later when you decide to translate. Voice actors and studio fees can incur costs, so look for tricks to keep voice cost down. You can limit the number of actors or characters in your content, as well as use voice-over narrative instead of live-screen action. That saves time by eliminating dubbing time to carefully match the voice, or having to re-film altogether with a native-speaking actor. You can also reduce costs by minimizing on-screen events that need to be in sync with certain words or phrases.
Video is the fastest growing rich media asset. Given the great diversity available in video look and feel, be sure to separate your video components to eliminate layers or re-work. For example, ensure your music and effects track is separate from any voice-over, and that your introduction screens and title cards are created in an editable format such as Photoshop. These assets can then be compiled by a localization-friendly editor such as Final Cut Pro or Adobe After Effects. If you have multiple animated screens, ensure that you layer your text separately in the native design program. When compiling the final localized video, it is crucial to have it reviewed by a native linguist for things that a non-speaker could never catch, such as dropped characters, truncated text, or incorrect animations. Also, do your research to identify the most popular media players in your target audience. The majority of English content can be properly displayed in .mov or .wmv format in the United States, but internationally browser popularity, bandwidth capabilities, and operating system requirements are vastly different depending on region.
Web content such as banners, emails, or interactive clickable .asp pages provide a solid basis for supporting other interactive assets. Save yourself time by creating English pages with enough room for language expansion, especially on buttons or links. Also test to make sure that your language settings and fonts support the language characters you are using. It is critical when localizing web-based files that you have the final content reviewed by a native linguist for spacing, line break, character accents, and other small details a non-native eye may never know to watch for. It is equally important to use a linguist with a background in website translation to be aware of code and spacing constraints.
Software has many of the same linguistic considerations of straight web content, but comprehensive testing is of more significant importance. Adding translated content, language expansion, foreign characters, and native coding to your user interface or functionality can cause numerous issues if not considered when you build your native English content. It is critical to partner with an experienced linguist who is familiar with string functions and coding language in the language your users will be viewing the content. Also, make all translatable text easily accessible. This means grouping all programmers' notes into consistent tags that are easily identifiable and paying special attention to the inter-functionality of your strings. For example, include all commands in the same string segments. If your text is full of concatenation, each sentence could be contained within multiple strings, the translated word structure will break the functionality of the string.
Graphics are the most important visual aspect of any digital media campaign, so make sure that you devote as much care and attention to your localized versions as you do in creating your English. Designers are not translators, and vice versa. It is important to set guidelines for each that will empower the other. For example, design your graphics with enough space for language expansion. Ensure that you select a font that is either compatible with the translated language (e.g., umlauts may not exist in your company's proprietary font), or select a similar foreign language font that conveys the same look and field as your English brand font. This is especially important in Asian languages, where the character sets are not supported in the same Western font sets. Also ensure that all text is accessible. Embedding text within images will result in more designer time and cost when you localize into multiple languages.
With so much rapidly-changing content and online competition for consumer attention, making your content stand out is key. Expanding that strategy abroad is important for an intelligent global campaign.
Chanin Ballance is the CEO of viaLanguage.
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