Keywords

Copy; resuability; dialect; translation; transcreation; localization; content; machine translation; search engines

6.1 Clarity and Reusability

That dusty copy of The Catcher in the Rye. That self-help book that kept you afloat during hard times. The battered-down, rustic paperback of Tom Sawyer with torn pages read in elementary school years. That child-rearing magazine you subscribed to when planning for a new child.

Books, like all things we hold dear, can have substance and emotional content. People hold on to them because it means something. May be the book provided an helpful answer to a dilemma. May be the book accompanied them on an exotic journey.

But the book always serves as an emotional anchor for personal experiences and insights. The text in the book does not matter as much as the experiences surrounding it and what was learned from it.

Written content in websites follows a similar principle. Websites do not benefit from texture or physicality, and only have around 10 seconds to stimulate the user’s attention. A novel usually requires a little more time than that.

Most importantly, for all the talk of content as business assets and emotional triggers in websites, it is extremely common to forget one simple fact: people do not love websites.

Websites are not artefacts like books, which can be held on to for emotional reasons. Their nature is transient and dynamic, and can quickly be taken down or fade with time.

In the case of social media, users can love the interaction with other people that the website allows. Or they might enjoy the trips they can book through a search website. But, unless they created it themselves, a website is not something to treasure. A website is not special in and of itself.

The content in the website, however, can be. It can teach the user, it can charm them. It can be creative and daring, or supportive and outreaching.

Localization does not start with the first translated language: it starts with the source. Knowing your audience and styling your content is just the beginning in a long journey towards a better user experience, but one that can make your content feel like a directed, cared-for labor of love, and not a patched-up set of snooze-inducing business and technical clichés.

As Audre Lorde once stated about the power of the word, “[it] is not only dream and vision; it is the skeleton architecture of our lives. It lays the foundations for a future of change, a bridge across our fears of what has never been before.” As the connective tissue of our present into the wired future, language and communication are the pump lines of our own substance as a species, and these pathways will overcome the test of time wherever it may be put.

Language is the human essence. It weaves and bobs our existences, lacing it with meaning and the power of connection. By far, language is the most essential human skill, whether it is spoken, written, or mimed. Language as communication has unbridled power and a paucity of isolation, allowing us to transcend our own shells and comfortable spaces.

6.2 Refining Affinity and Tone

Everything we interact with generates a specific emotion suited to reinforcement or repression. Regardless of culture, users are emotionally affected by the register and tone of the text. There are four “R” principles that improve the grittiness of mundane user experience and guide usability:

The Adestra Email Subject Lines 2012 study found that consumers are 33.4% less likely to open a message that had their name in the subject line and 53% less likely to click through the contents. This is one of the reasons why clarity in messaging is so important. I recently read the ultimate upselling strategy in a conference description: “we offer you a free workshop for the price of your ticket.” When is paid for actually free? Words can be used to obscure and obfuscate, not just in their intent, but also in their very length.

If you are familiar with Reddit’s lingo (or indeed any forum, particularly of a technical nature), you know that verbosity and propensity are usually dismissed with despondent disinterest, peppered with sarcasm. Most users take a similar stance when using a website or software application that is too fond of text for its own good.

It is not just laziness that drives most users to avoid interacting with overlong texts. In evolutionary terms, although oral language evolved over 2 million years, the first written symbols date from only 3500 BC, and the first alphabetic records date from 1000 BC. During our cognitive evolution, language became a natural skill, but writing appeared long after our basic brain structures were already in place. Therefore unlike oral language acquisition, reading and writing are not innate skills in infants and have to be learned.

Since literacy is individually variable, and users typically want to avoid as much effort as possible, clarity is key for user acceptance and retention. A localized version of a product can emphasize functionality by upholding the following criteria in the master locale:

Keep in mind that reading on-screen is more wearisome on the eyes and takes almost twice as long as reading on paper. Therefore text density also plays a role in providing visual comfort for reading. Depending on the resolution, short lines with a maximum of 80 characters are a good rule of thumb.

6.3 Dialects and Variations

Languages are as fluid as the cultures that spawn them, and they are never as standardized and formal as dictionaries and grammar books would have us believe. Accents and idiomatic expressions shift with just a few miles separation, but languages also fracture and diverge according to groups, regional position, and local dynamic. Dialects are representations of this difference, and the separation between America and the United Kingdom exemplifies this distance, with examples like “waste basket” and “rubbish bin” coloring the difference. Any serious product or service aiming at success in either territory would benefit from having a specific linguistic version for both territories, as there is no universal “English” variation.

An example that is more consensual is Spanish, both European and the Latin American variants. Although the language has some regionalisms between the different countries, there is generally no immediate prejudice against reading Spanish as written and read in Spain. The same is not true of Brazilian Portuguese. Dialects that have slight changes in grammar and use of pronouns are often equated with a general form of the language rather than individual dialects.

6.4 Building a Global Content Strategy

Web content is bent on immediacy and conciseness, and with so many options in the market, common knowledge stipulates it has to be “punchy” and “to the point.” It has to be “structured” and include all the “relevant search engine optimization (SEO) keywords.”

Content, however, must not simply be content, it must have content. It has to matter to the audience. It can even teach them during the process.

Localized content is even more critical, because of the necessities and changing habits of international audiences.

Therefore content must take into account three basic factors:

Nowadays, localization offices find themselves dabbling more and more in copy. Copywriting, particularly for international websites, is where source content lives and grows.

And often companies fail to understand that localization does not start with the first translated language: it starts with the source.

Knowing your audience and styling your content is just the beginning in a long journey towards a better user experience, but one that can make your content feel like a directed, cared-for labor of love, and not a patched-up set of snooze-inducing business and technical clichés.

A localized website into Japanese has its own particular needs, and the modern necessities of tight timelines and decentralized work often do not allow for a sufficiently agile approach to content.

So, how can we sort an approach to the content that maximizes translatability while still maintaining relevance?

Traits like “personality” and “charm” do not have to be the nemesis to “translatability” and “consistent.” As Bruce Lee stated, it is not about the increase, but about the decrease. Get rid of the unessentials and, underneath the varnishing of wording, the message will resonate and shine through.

6.5 Translation and Transcreation

In translation studies, the debate has been ranging for decades, if not centuries: should translation attempt to be as literal as possible in order to emulate the style of the original or should it try to emulate the effect that the author intended on the audience? Should it mime the content or try to achieve an overall amplified effect similar to the original?

In localization, given the cultural instantiation between the target cultures, and the need to establish an emotional connection with the user with minimal external contextualization, translation is a principle that translation should be as effect oriented.

When a user interacts with a given UI scheme, the concepts and flow of the layout, control disposition and internal logic are subjacent to the user’s own goals. The user wants to accomplish a task or a set of tasks with minimal interference from dodgy and inconsistent control placement or avant-garde artistry.

There is a cognitive threshold for how much information can be assimilated simultaneously on both a visual and perceptual level. Most users will have a hard time reading on-screen, which is naturally more tiring and takes almost twice as long as reading on the paper.

6.6 International SEO

Content discoverability is an operative word in contemporary companies, and practically equates having a high SEO index on the company’s websites. Roughly, organic searches are those accomplished intentionally by the user: when you enter a query like “best knife set” in Google, clicking on one of the results is considered an “organic” result.

According to a moz.com survey, over 20% of clicks in the Google search results home page are on the paid results (moz.com), with organic results ranged in the 80% mark. In the United States, over 30% of users click on the first result in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page), with the first three results encompassing almost 60% of all user clicks. The second page of the search results is a lonely and cold place devoid of human attention.

From these facts, it is easy to assume that search ranking is essential for businesses, and many consultancies use this as a prime selling point. However, a good search ranking is not as essential as in the past. In China, where business micropages abound, businesses rely on social network recommendations and reposts in order to generate interest and drive the meta-traffic into their landing pages. Services are increasingly looking at ways of fitting into the particular ecosystem that is WeChat while relying less on the organic search trade.

However, global search and content discoverability remains a critical business function; ensuring that your brand and content can be found online in local markets, and as such, content discoverability goes beyond great localization.

How and where local users find your brand, localized content and on what device type, matters as much as search behavior and intent. Understanding local user search behaviors and intent and ensuring the correct content is used in the right context for each of the types of search traffic usually attached to a public website. In order to properly optimize the SEO quotient of a website, you should be able to quantify and analyze the following:

The local search engine landscape is a key aspect, as search habits are usually closely related to the engine’s own particularities (Fig. 6.6.1).

According to a Webcredible 2015 study, Google is by far the most widely used search engine all over the world by worldwide market share. It is also the most popular search engine in nearly every territory in the world, including Argentina, South Africa, and Thailand. However, there are some key territories that the infamous portal has not managed to win over and obtain the market lion’s share:

China, Russia, and South Korea are part of a handful of select countries where Google has not achieved overpowering dominance over local search engines. What made these countries different and how is the search experience different from elsewhere?

Search engines in these countries focused on local quality content, and spoke to the aesthetic and real-life sensibilities of the Korean users. At a time when Korean page indexing was complex and escaped the limited character encoding of Western websites, local search engines sprouted as a response to the local needs, and established a powerful domineering position over the market that remains largely unchallenged. Three factors influenced this situation directly.

The first factor was language. Indexing the content of different scripts was technically difficult, with Western search engines focusing on Latin alphabets that were carrying languages like English and French.

Second, in a relatively small but extremely intensive online environment, at the turn of the 2000s, there was very little content available to satisfy consumers looking for endemic websites. In Korea, Naver circumvented the situation by emphasizing user-created content in a single integrated service, “Knowledge Search,” that allowed users to exchange questions and answers that were then to be ranked according to recommendations. This model was later adopted by the Yahoo! Answers service.

Third, the most successful search engines are not only search engines. Like Google, Naver, Yandex, and Baidu all combine several services, including news, blogs, and mail in the same access portal. They are consolidated solutions to the most basic services users require when accessing the Internet, and provide entry points to users’ most commonly used services.

6.7 Controlled Language and Machine Translation

In the modern global business, any mobile app or website is exposed to potential markets numbering in the hundreds of millions, spread across the four corners of the Earth. Cultural and linguistic boundaries are therefore transcended. In order to be as audience-inclusive as possible as well, the language used needs to be simple and accessible, but also familiar.

Organization-wide implementation of Simplified English as the master locale can help you to single-source your content effectively and provide a steady basis for translation and transcreation.

Affordable machine translation has been available commercially for the past few years, and most translation agencies use it in their workflow combined with fuzzy segmentation matching. However, in-house teams can implement their own internal machine translation (MT) server using open-source machine translation engines based on Windows or Amazon Cloud.

Most of these solutions are based on Moses, a statistical machine translation engine that has grown in popularity, which uses the same approach as Google Translate. Once an ambitious project to start a machine translation movement, it has become progressively a reliable engine that complements human-based translation workflows. You can host and service a MT server internally, and leverage translated material that is already available in your documentation to automatically train translation models. The more material you have initially, the better results can be obtained.

If you do not have a large volume of translated material (e.g., less than a million words), you can look at other open-source engines that rely on linguistic rules to process the input. The configuration is hard, but the results might be better for language pairs of highly systemic languages.

The best approach to any form of controlled language is that each lexical entry (root or part-of-speech) has only one possible semantic interpretation in its linguistic domain. The goal with this is to eliminate the need for interactive disambiguation of ambiguous terminology. If you are sourcing the material internally, however, it is possible that upon domain analysis you find hundreds or even thousands of terms that have more than one semantic interpretation, depending on context.

For example, “charge” can be interpreted either as charging an electrical element such as a battery, or pressurizing a gas container such as an ether cylinder.

Ambiguity is the enemy of sound machine translation, making it essential that a streamlined terminology and accurate multiple meanings is essential for accurate machine translation, so we extended the design of the grammar checker to include an interactive disambiguation module. When ambiguous terms are identified, the system asks the author to specify the intended meaning, which is then preserved in the input text using an unobtrusive SGML marker (Mitamura & Nyberg, 1995).