“Bilingual or multilingual people can work for localization.” It is totally incorrect.
Global companies in the U.S. have a localization team that often works with language service providers. The localization team members are several localization specialists who specialize in various fields, such as desktop publishing, technology, project management, terminology, websites, QA, and translation. The required specializations of localization professionals depend on the company’s target product.
Here are some benefits of having localization professionals.
Productivity
Localization professionals increase productivity. The localization process is necessary when a company releases products, updates specifications, or supports additional languages. Localization professionals work in various areas, such as software, manuals, support systems, and websites. They understand effective ways to localize. They usually use a translation management system (TMS) to manage multiple projects. Localization specialists with various specialized skills work to collaborate with various departments, such as development and marketing. Those collaboration and localization skills help to improve corporate productivity.
Branding
Localization affects corporate branding. Translation is the process of changing one language into another language that accurately reflects the original expression. Localization, on the other hand, creates sentences that are culturally appropriate and natural to the customer’s specific region. Examples of such texts include advertisements and catchphrases. Localization professionals might create totally different sentences for the target region because it is important to convey the intention of the sentences in the original language to adapt to the region.
Customer Satisfaction
Since consistent sentences are easy to read and understand, it affects customer satisfaction. To ensure consistent translations across software, manuals, support systems, websites, and other components, localization professionals use Style Guides, Terminology, and Translation Memory (TM). A style guide is a set of rules for sentence style. For example, the rule might be that “可能です” should not be used to increase readability. Terminology is a set of terms for specific areas. Terminology is created by systematically analyzing and identifying terms that need to be determined. The TM is the data that ensures consistency with previous translations, such as translations of previous versions of the same product. Also, localization engineers configure QA checks that mainly utilize regular expressions based on the style guide. It finds and corrects sentences that do not follow the style guide or have incorrect translations. For further verification, it is also checked by native speakers. Setting up the system and tools ensures consistency across the various localizations and provides a product that is easy to use for global customers.
Conclusion
Bilingual or multilingual people without localization skills are not competitive with localization professionals, who are language experts with localization expertise. The localization team is essential for global business.