The Unexpected Complexities of Secure Portal Translation

As your company expands to serve multilingual customers in untapped domestic or international markets, it shouldn’t overlook localizing a key component of its digital experience: secure portals for customers, business partners and employees.

These experiences help provide a fully localized UX that delivers long-term business benefits, from increased conversions and retention to improved relationships with international distributors and resellers.

But for your localized portals to successfully serve your business goals, they must deliver this translated content in ways that are absolutely seamless and instant to your global customers.

This is much harder than it sounds—especially for companies that want to take on this challenge using in-house resources or underqualified vendors.

Portal Localization Is Harder Than Most Folks Think

Many companies consider using internal resources to translate their secure portal experiences, but soon determine that this approach requires far more effort and budget than expected. It also becomes more trouble than it's worth.

Since most in-house teams haven't managed complex portal translation projects, they often lean on manual or untested processes. This usually means they engage in an iterative process of:

• Finding relevant content throughout the portal and exporting it for translation
• Sending this compiled content to in-house linguists
• Editing those translations for quality
• Integrating the translated content into the localized instance of the portal
• Visually QA’ing translated content on the page to ensure it displays properly and doesn’t create functionality issues or text misalignments

This time-consuming process represents the workflow for localizing a single webpage within a portal. This process must then be used for every relevant page within the portal. And this workload—and need for additional in-house resources—naturally increases when the portal must be localized in more languages.

Exponentially complicating matters is the innovative (and complicated) interactive technologies most portals use for the UX. Reliably identifying translatable text within these complex applications and databases is practically impossible for in-house linguists. It's also beyond the capabilities of nearly all translation vendors, too.

Consider the questions your organization will face as it launches and continually operates multilingual portals:

• 您是否有足够的人手管理这些新的技术和流程？
• Do your people have the technical expertise to launch and maintain multiple multilingual instances of your portal system?
• Do they have the innovative content-parsing technology to intelligently detect translatable content within complex applications, JavaScript, JSON, XML and other frameworks?
• 他们是否具备在全职从事本职工作的基础上承担这些任务的带宽？

In-house and vendor approaches that lean into inefficient manual processes and underdeveloped technologies lead to higher costs in the long run. Even when these costs aren't felt directly at first, they quickly grow when staff time and other intangibles are factored in.

‘Portal Translation’ Is About More Than Translation

When it comes to allocating budget for in-house portal translation, most stakeholders perceive the project as a single line item. This makes sense—after all, that’s how vendors submit their invoices. 人们很容易就会假设，内部网站翻译项目也可以用同样的方式来解释。

但“翻译”并不局限于翻译。这些成本涵盖数十个独立元素，包括很少有高管能够充分了解的任务。

除了实际的内容翻译工作流外，“翻译”还涵盖员工工时、技术使用、获取特定的资源等。

Let’s examine just one of those elements mentioned above—technology usage:

• The scope and cost of creating or managing portal translation technologies can quickly overwhelm most in-house teams
• Most teams hope the multilingual features of their portals (if those systems have multilingual features at all) can efficiently handle the workload
• Unfortunately, those tools are often undercooked, and can’t handle the day-to-day rigors of portal translation

开发解决方案以弥补这些不足需要时间和精力，此外还要为额外的技术投入更多成本。

即便投入这些资源，解决方案能否在长期发挥作用依然不明确。Updates or changes to your portal's technology stack down the road often create unforeseen challenges and costs.

结论

Remember, the actual task of translating digital text, images and other online elements represents only a sliver of the true cost of portal translation. 成本还涵盖技术、智能翻译管理和旨在为您省钱的高效软件。

The best translation vendors specialize in the very complex process of portal translation. They provide these capabilities and more, eliminating the need for in-house teams (and the costs associated with building those teams).

Look for solutions that combine the best translations with leading technologies that eliminate effort, minimize costs and accelerate speed to market.

请记住，您付费购买的不止是译文，You should be paying for excellent portal translation management technology, turn-key convenience and more.