Integrate localization with your content management system: A step-by-step guide

Growth is a double-edged sword for businesses. On the one hand, it presents exciting opportunities for expansion and increased revenue. On the other hand, scaling comes with its own set of unique challenges. As your business thrives and attracts a broader international audience, content localization becomes an area that requires strategic rethinking. Suddenly, handling several languages - on top of all other design and development tasks - doesn’t feel so manageable.

This is where things often get tricky. The more languages you support and the wider your international footprint extends, the more complex and resource-intensive your content localization process becomes. Juggling multiple tech solutions and platforms, formats, tracking updates in spreadsheets, and coordinating all content across the various tools your team is using can quickly drain your energy and resources. This complexity can lead to delays, inconsistencies in translated content, and a subpar user experience for your global customers. If your current approach is feeling strained, it's definitely time to consider evolving your workflow and stack to match your company's growth.

Here's where the issues typically start:

Resource drain: Your current localization process hinges on far too many manual tasks. Manually transferring content between platforms, copy-pasting translations, setting up new languages, and keeping track of updates across different channels can quickly become overwhelming. These repetitive and tedious tasks eat up valuable time and resources, diverting your team's focus from more strategic work.

Change resistance: Teams are often hesitant to embrace new workflows, especially when change feels like it means more work in the short term. If teams are overworked, they’re reluctant to add to their load—even if it means a more efficient workflow in the future. This can slow down the entire process, creating bottlenecks and friction throughout the localization pipeline.

New needs: As your business scales, new requirements arise. Integrating with a wider range of tools becomes crucial to streamline processes. You may face an explosion in the sheer volume of content to handle, along with the pressure to support more languages. Traditional solutions may not be able to keep pace with these rapidly evolving needs.

Pricing issues: Traditional models for translation services often scale alongside your business using per-word pricing. While this might be manageable initially, costs can quickly skyrocket as your operations grow. This can put a strain on your budget and leave you looking for ways to cut corners.

These scenarios paint a bleak picture, but thankfully, there are ways to address these common pain points. But where do you even begin? The key lies in process optimization, automation, and choosing the right tools to support your growth.

Section titled Getting the basics right Getting the basics right

Before we dive into optimization strategies, it's essential to understand the fundamental building blocks of a successful localization workflow. These are important to consider whether you’re starting from scratch or already have a workflow in place. Here's where your focus should be:

The right people in the right place: Identify the key players within your organization who will drive localization efforts. This often includes content designers for generating source material, localizers for making it shine in other markets, project and product managers to oversee the entire process, and developers for implementation.

Curated context information: It is crucial to provide translators with sufficient background, visual cues, and explanations about the content’s intended use. This context ensures that translations are not only linguistically correct but also capture the intended meaning and nuances.

Integration within your workflow: Carefully consider where localization fits within your broader content creation and development process. Ideally, it should be integrated as early as possible to minimize delays and streamline updates.

Technology and tools: Carefully select the tools that will power your localization endeavors. Consider a translation management system (TMS) like Localazy, a robust content management system that will integrate with it, and any other platforms that seamlessly integrate with your existing tech stack and can support your chosen workflow.

Quality assurance (QA): Design robust processes to ensure your translated content is accurate, culturally relevant, and consistent with your brand's voice and tone. Remember, maintaining quality is paramount for an excellent user experience across all markets.

With these essential elements in mind, you can start developing a localization process (or revising your existing one) that's efficient, scalable, and delivers consistently high-quality results.

Section titled Optimizing an existing localization workflow Optimizing an existing localization workflow

If your business already has a workflow in place, but you're struggling with complexity as you scale, it's time for optimization. You can make things much more efficient by implementing a method called "continuous localization" — a real game-changer for many companies.

Section titled What is continuous localization? What is continuous localization?

Traditional localization tends to treat translations as separate projects with defined start and end dates. This can lead to delays and bottlenecks, especially when your business is rapidly expanding. Continuous localization breaks away from this model, integrating the translation process seamlessly into your development cycle. This means new content or updates are continuously pushed for translation, allowing you to simultaneously release new features or updates in multiple languages instead of waiting for complete translation batches.

Section titled How can you lighten the load? How can you lighten the load?

Here are key ways to optimize your workflow and make things easier and more efficient:

Simplify the work of professional translators: Translators are the backbone of high-quality localization. By providing them with the right tools and resources, you can significantly improve their efficiency and ensure consistent, accurate translations.

Streamline translation delivery: Choose tools that offer an easy-to-use, intuitive user experience. These can speed up translator work, cut the time required for reviews and QA, automate important tasks, and leave you free to focus on moving your tasks down the pipeline. A well-designed TMS, for example, can make it easy to push new strings for translation and pull in the completed translations with minimal friction. This reduces delays caused by cumbersome file transfers and updates.

Integrate and take advantage of interconnected systems: By choosing a TMS that offers robust integrations, you create a connected ecosystem for your localization workflow. Localazy, for example, provides over 80+ integrations, a powerful CLI, an SDK, and even Zapier connections. This lets you incorporate translation seamlessly into your existing workflows involving your CMS, design tools, marketing automation platforms, and more.

Automate - Workflow optimization via automation: Automation is your friend when it comes to efficiency. Look for features within your TMS that can help you save time and automate repetitive or time-consuming tasks.

Section titled Making everyone happy Making everyone happy

Change can be met with resistance, but getting your team excited about the benefits of localization optimization is essential for a smooth transition. Here's how to create a collaborative and supportive environment:

Promote a culture of localization: Make localization a core value within your company. Clearly articulate how it connects to business growth, better user experiences, and global expansion. Celebrate successes and highlight the positive impact localization has had on your reach and customer satisfaction. Learn about making your company more localization-friendly in this article.

Build a robust vendor-selection process: When selecting external translation vendors, taking time to consider your needs will help you craft a better Request for Proposal (RFP) and ensure you find the ideal fit. Clearly define your requirements, expectations for quality, and turnaround times. This sets clear standards from the very beginning.

Foster cross-team collaboration: Localization is a team effort. Encourage open communication and define clear processes between developers, designers, content creators, and marketing teams. Use tools that facilitate this collaboration and help various team members work together towards better localization.

Understand there’s a learning curve: Choose intuitive tools and platforms that minimize onboarding time. Provide comprehensive training materials and support resources to ensure a smooth adoption of new systems and workflows. Recognize that a gradual transition might be necessary for some teams.

Section titled Localazy + Storyblok: A Powerful Partnership Localazy + Storyblok: A Powerful Partnership

If you're building a project with global reach, adding a robust translation solution is a must. This is where Localazy's seamless integration with Storyblok truly shines, transforming your efforts toward a streamlined and highly efficient multilingual workflow. This integration offers granular control, ensuring your translated content remains accurate and contextually relevant.

Using this integration, you can create field-level translations for specific UI elements, entire sections, pages, or blocks of your Storyblok content. This makes your process extremely flexible.

When you combine the power of Storyblok and Localazy, you unlock a whole new level of management for your multilingual content. Effortlessly streamline workflows, maintain quality control, and create a seamless user experience for your diverse audience around the globe.

Section titled Conclusion Conclusion

Scaling your business brings exciting opportunities, but localization can become a challenge. By embracing continuous localization, implementing automation, and using the right tools (like the Localazy and Storyblok integration), you can streamline processes, save resources, and deliver a top-notch localized experience to your global customers.

At Localazy, we offer a single invoice for 60+ languages, professionally done on-demand. Our integration with Storyblok, along with unlimited seats and languages, helps you optimize your workflow right away. This allows you to deliver a superior customer experience while keeping those ever-growing localization costs under control.