In order to create content that will resonate with a multinational audience, companies must take care to localize it to meet the cultural, geopolitical, and educational needs of the audience at hand. You’ll not only need to strip away confusing lingo, industry jargon, metaphors, euphemisms, and unnecessarily complex language, you may also need to translate your content or, at the very least, clean it up so it can be translated with the help of automated, machine translation services. In other words, this is a job for both man and machine!

While the discipline of localization includes more than translation, getting language right is critical to communicating your message. That’s why we’ve provided some suggestions for vendors of software and services to get you started, but all tools are not created equal.

Machine Translation Software–Machine translation software is designed to translate text or speech from one language to another.

Translation Management Systems–A translation management system is designed to help streamline the entire translation process, including such things as vendor selection, workflow routing, project management, translation, delivery, and storage of completed translations.

Computer-Aided Translation Tools–Computer-aided translation (also referred to as computer- or machine-assisted) tools help translation professionals through the translation process. Tools used in computer-aided translation include spell-checks, grammar checks, terminology management software, concordancers, bitext aligners, translation memory tools, and others.

Terminology Management Tools–Terminology management tools help control the use of terms, as well as rules for their usage, to help ensure your content is unambiguous.

Translation Memory Tools–Translation memory tools are computer databases used to store words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs that have been translated in order to prevent organizations from retranslating that content. Translation memory tools are sometimes referred to as translation memory managers. More.

See: Econtent