If you’re maintaining localized websites for your brand, you know what a tedious process it can be to get new website content from your content marketing program translated and published on your localized sites. In this Martech Minute, we speak with Wendy Pease from translation firm Rapport International. Their new RapAlert technology promises to streamline the website translation process and dramatically cut the time it takes to publish new localized content.

Thanks for joining us here on the Martech Minute, I’m Colin White with Martekrs, and today I’m pleased to be joined by Wendy Pease, she’s the owner of Rapport International. Thanks for joining me today Wendy.

Q: Rapport International is a translation firm, and I understand you have some technology called RapAlert, which helps to streamline the translation or globalization process for websites. So tell us a little bit about how you came to create the RapAlert technology?

Wendy Pease: Well what we’ve been finding is a lot of marketers are working really hard to create new content and always have something new up on the website, and pushing it out and pushing it out. And it’s fine when you have a lot of English speakers and they’re writing it and putting it up. But then what was happening is the translated website or portions of the website were falling behind, because they couldn’t keep up with the translation.

So it’s been a very manual process – people do the translation, they get it up on the website, and then they have to send it out to the translation agency. They edit it, there’s in-house review, and then it goes around the circle and its lots of e-mails back and forth. And then it’s got to go to the web posting person to get it up there. And then sometimes even a review by a language person to make sure it’s done right. So it’s very cumbersome. It takes a long time. It takes a lot of internal resources.

So we looked at that and we said wait a minute, we’re project management experts, this is what we do. So we created RapAlert. So when somebody posts something in English, it alerts us that that’s been done, what copy needs to be translated, what language it needs to be in. We take it through the process, and then either work with the company as to whether they want us to upload it, and check it and make sure it’s right. Or whether their web person is going to put it up. RapAlert has taken a 21 step process and moved it down to a three step process.

Q: I’ve worked with translation firms before, for creating globalized content in different languages for my brand’s websites, and there are translation firms I have worked with that have managed the project very well – you give them the content, and there’s a workflow that they bring into play. But it sounds like you have really streamlined and automated that whole process.

Do you have any metrics on how much faster you can get content translated and published versus the old-school process?

Wendy Pease: It depends on the length of the content and what it was doing, but it used to take five to seven days, and now we’ve boiled it down to a couple of days. But the other key to it is content is usually re-purposed. So when we run it through our process, we run it through a translation memory – we keep the memory, so if you’re you reusing content, rather than having to re-translate it, we can pull it from the memory and then use that, so what that does is keep a consistency of voice. It streamlines the process, and allows you to leverage what’s already been done.

Q: Can we drill in a little bit more into this this concept of “transweblation” you mentioned? How do you define that and how is that different from translation in general?

Wendy Pease: Well transweblation is a term we came up with because I’m looking at what people are doing for marketing now, that they’re translating their website. And we’ve seen it again and again with clients as they develop this new website: it’s in English, they take the copy, they send it off to get translated, they pop it up and then they start adding the English copy. They’re adding their social media posts, they’re doing their blogs. And the translation side of it falls behind.

So we’re saying, okay, there’s a whole process here that’s called transweblation – it’s doing the original website, and then it’s keeping up with quality postings in the other languages. Because a whole other area to talk about is quality. You can put Google Translate on your site now, and instantaneously it can use machine translation and put it up there. But the quality is still not there. You still need human involvement to do that.

So then we’re looking at it with oh you’re cheap, low quality.  But people want to buy from websites in their languages. So when you start looking at the metrics of success, if you do a high quality translation, it’s a world of difference right now.

Q: So you mentioned social media posts. Does the RapAlert technology work with social media posts as well as web sites?

Wendy Pease: It does if it’s not instantaneous.  Like you put up a LinkedIn post and then it’s going to be translated because you still need the human touch on it. So what we try to do is get our clients to really come up with their social media plan. Oftentimes the copy is written in advance and released so if they do that then we can translate it and have it ready for release at the same time.

Q: So in terms of the timing of the post, you mentioned that it streamlines the process of translating the content. But do you find your clients are okay with posting some content today in English, and then waiting a few more days until you have the globalized or translated content for their other local websites?

Wendy Pease: Yeah because what’s happening now is a lot of them aren’t even getting the translated copy up, or they’re waiting a much longer time. So it can come out on a staggered basis. It’s just, let’s define the process of what our expectations are, and put that in.

Q: So what’s the best way for marketers to get in touch with you – do you have a trial of the RapAlert technology or is it something that that’s a little bit more involved?

Wendy Pease: Yeah it’s a little bit more involved with that because we want to know what their memory is, what their process is, and we want to break it down for them. So if they want to use internal resources, we can build that into the process. So they can certainly reach out to us on our website – RapportTranslations.com or look me up on LinkedIn through Rapport International or Wendy Pease. Or give us a call at 978-443-2540.

Q: Alright this has been interesting stuff Wendy, thanks very much for joining us!

Wendy Pease: Thank you so much, pleasure to talk to you Colin.

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