4 Major Challenges of Portal Translation, and 3 Ways to Overcome Them

The value of translating secure customer portals becomes very apparent, very quickly, when your company engages multilingual and international users. After all, customers won't stay customers for long if they can't read:

• Personalized account-management pages
• Product shipping and return information
• Self-service customer support content
• Offers for service upgrades, bundles or cost savings
• Personal healthcare, financial and other private data
• 以及其他功能

But localizing these secure login areas is notoriously challenging—even more challenging than localizing conventional public-facing websites. To provide a seamlessly translated CX that increases engagement, conversions and revenue, you need to understand the key challenges of portal translation.

Here’s a quick list of the pitfalls, along with some best practices that can save your company time, effort and money.

4 Major Challenges of Portal Translation

Even the savviest technologists may not fathom the problems that can sidetrack or outright derail a portal translation project. Here some common ”gotchas” to be aware of:

1: Multilingual Portal Features Aren’t Enough

Some portal-management providers claim their platforms have multilingual features that can easily handle translated content. 遗憾的是，其中大多数功能都不成熟。往往需要付出意料之外的精力和资源进行维护。

For instance, these systems rarely have automated translation workflows, which forces your team (or a vendor) to manually manage the process of finding on-site translatable content, sending it off to translators, and integrating the translated material into the localized website.

这种流程费时、容易出错且代价高昂。

2: Unexpected Opportunity Costs

Many companies believe they can tackle their portal translation projects with in-house resources. It's best avoiding this technical and financial minefield. The problems your teams inherit will quickly outpace the cost of hiring a seasoned portal translation vendor. 例如：

• Hiring new personnel to manage translations and localized portal instances
• Translating text, images and multimedia content such as info sheets and service manuals
• Assessing the quality of translations
• 对译文进行质量把控，找到网站上的设计问题
• Accurately parsing text from complex web applications and dynamic-content databases
• Maintaining the portal’s ongoing operation and security

3: Costly Legacy Business Models

Choosing a vendor is poses its own risks, too. Many translation providers generate the bulk of their revenue by charging by the translated word.

They’re not incentivized to develop optimizations that might reduce your project’s word count, which would reduce your costs. In fact, their legacy business models depend on maximizing your translation spend, not minimizing it.

Even when vendors offer attractive low price-per-word translation rates, things may not be what they seem. Low prices may result in poor translation quality, or might distract you from unseen costs associated with editing and project management.

4: Underdeveloped Content Parsers

The engaging personalized experiences that portals provide are powered by complex web applications, interactive functionality and dynamic technologies. This makes them uniquely challenging to translate.

Accurately parsing and compiling a portal's translatable content-which is usually tucked away within React and Angular frameworks, JSON or XML code-is practically impossible for in-house linguists. Nearly all third-party vendors can't make sense of these technologies, either.

The end result:

• Special phrases in programming code are mistakenly translated, disabling the application
• Not all translatable content is detected, resulting in a partially-translated UX

Neither outcome is acceptable.

3 Ways to Overcome Portal Translation Challenges

Choosing the right translation partner isn't as hard as it sounds, if your goal is to eliminate effort for your internal teams. 出色的服务提供商可在不影响翻译质量、速度、灵活性或节约成本的情况下做到这一点。

1: Choose a Solution that Minimizes Complexity

Look for a portal translation approach that delivers a world-class experience for your multilingual customers without overtaxing your in-house team.

Proxy-based translation solutions can do that. They operate independently of your portal platform, making translation and operation effort-free for you. The best solutions are fully compatible with your tech stack, even if your portal was built with in-house resources or leverages content stored in legacy (or obsolete) frameworks.

2: Turn-Key Approaches Dramatically Reduce Effort and Costs

The best vendors offer turn-key proxy-based solutions that:

• Fully manage the task of detecting new portal content, translating it and publishing it in about one business day
• Leverage technologies that efficiently reduce your project’s word count, which reduces translation costs
• Offer fair per-word translation rates that include editorial revision, on-page QA and more

3: Supports All On-Site Content

Fully turn-key solutions with superior content-parsing technologies can handle all of the under-the-hood complexities that make portal translation such a burden for IT teams. The aforementioned issues about web applications and dynamic, personalized content are great examples of this.

Great turn-key proxy solutions can parse translatable text from these applications while preserving their framework logic. After translation, they elegantly reintegrate the localized content back into the applications, too.

They can also translate content that “lives” on third-party services or servers, or in multimedia files (such as images, PDFs and videos), all with no customer-side effort required.

结论

It’s critical to choose a great vendor whose solution sidesteps the common pitfalls of portal translation, and embodies its best practices. The best vendors eliminate effort for you, and deliver seamlessly localized portal experiences for your customers—no matter where they live, or what language they speak.