Is It Really Worth Translating?
Is Translating Really Worth it?
Marketers are fully aware that in a globalized world, a multilingual digital presence can greatly increase revenue. However, one of the challenges they face is determining the real impact of language services, localizing websites, etc. to understand its actual value and, if necessary, obtain budget approval from stakeholders.
It's true that you can't do business internationally without translating your most important marketing assets, but in many cases, localization isn't something you can simply tie directly to your ROI. This is what you need to be able to operate and grow globally. However, certain basic criteria must be measured to evaluate the effectiveness of your spending on language services.
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What are the metrics that measure translation impact?
What benefit can localization bring?
By tracking this metric, you can see your translation investment as a percentage of the profit generated by the languages you support. Localization alone is not responsible for all of this revenue because of the other resources involved. From another perspective, you'll be able to calculate your ROI based on localization, as if you were trying to figure out what percentage is entirely attributable to network or team billing. But if you think of language services (especially localization) as a revenue generator rather than a revenue generator, their value, while difficult to measure, is undeniable.
What is the cost of language localization as a percentage of language support revenue?
This number should decrease over time as your site plan evolves. However, there is no formula for determining the "correct" investment or percentage. This will change over time depending on what you're translating versus what you're doing locally, your marketing strategy, how much content you include, etc.
How does location affect customer acquisition costs?
Your translation cost can be easily calculated as a percentage of CPA for each supported language market. Because product localization often represents a large portion of the total localization budget, you can separate spending on product localization from sales and marketing.
What is the location cost percentage for a R&D budget?
Many software vendors consider localization as part of their overall R&D budget. It's nice and simple. But if the translation supports functionality beyond the product, it won't be fully pure scaling unless you can map it directly to the product based on the other feature
Ready to increase your global reach?
Contact Idiomatic Canada for a quick chat to help your brand succeed globally. The real ROI of translations is their impact on end users, loyalty and engagement. We should all be obsessed with customer experience and understand how location affects customer experience metrics. This is how we sit at the proverbial table and speak the language of other stakeholders.