So I wanted to start this post with another question, because it has a lot of consequences, interestingly it may not be as simple as it would at first appear.
The Challenge
One thing we need to establish, is that (depending on your intended needs) you can't necessarily correlate languages to specific countries, at least in the working world. According to a recent Statista report published in 2019, in the US alone when it comes to languages - it's complicated. When it comes to the EU, it's also complicated.
One of the reasons for this complication is because of net migration. People seek out better opportunities where they are available, which is understandable and exciting at the same time and will likely be even more important in the post pandemic world. This then brings an influx of amazing other cultures, experiences and of course languages to places where they weren't as present as before.
It's easy to therefore assume that English is the defacto language of the UK and the US, however in reality that really isn't the full story. Which is partly due to the past 100 years of migration patterns as can also be seen in this fascinating report from Insider in 2020.
As a Business, Platform Owner, Service Owner and / or Service Provider how do we overcome this and if we don't is it a real business challenge that could have a tangible benefit if we action something?
The Opportunity
The first thing I would posit, is setting up an internal forum with the wider internal company community. Is it even known if English is the most spoken language within the organisation or is it assumed? If asked what would respondents answer? French? Spanish? Hindi? Quebcois?
Due to presence in certain countries, are there some languages that are legally required to be provided for internal contents, such as HR policies etc?
If a list of potential languages is drawn up, could it open the doors for new business opportunities? Could it expand existing horizons? Could it expand hiring capabilities?
To get to the next steps, we have a workbook to guide you through those next steps available on our CSC page here.
The Method
When it comes to the actual plan enactment, not all languages need to be actioned at the same time. Some may take longer than others (which is absolutely understandable). Which means more (if desired) can be added in the future, as processes mature and capabilities increase. Of course we have training on the topic here.
Measuring what you define as success is really important as well as regularly checking in with your target audience to see if it meets their needs also, because if they can't use the solution, is it helping or hindering them? If hindering it would be defeating the original objective, so a key topic to watch all the time.
Summary
The take away from all of this is to check with your target audience what their needs are. Have an open dialogue with them because it's all for them. If your target user-group can't interact with the Services offered today if translated in their language would that help? If it is translated today, can improvements be made? Is the content suitable for them? Is it presented in a way they are familiar with?
The list goes on, because the idea is that it shouldn't be treated as a one and done concept. In the world of software development there is a concept called "continuous localization", which at a high-level means there's always more to localize and translate because there's new features, new content etc being added to the solution.
To be fair, it's not a simple concept to get right because as your process mature over time there are additional opportunities to find optimisations or automation opportunities (such as extractions and imports etc).
I like to think of the whole concept of "Localization" as a way of making the target audience as becoming able to consume what's available to them. Just because English is the most spoken language in the world, it doesn't mean everyone can read it, speak it, understand it as well as myself for example.
- In this very article, I deliberately left some Americanisms of spellings vs English to show what I mean, see if you can spot them.
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