Considering the vital role that secure portals and login experiences now play in…
- Customer service and retention
- Revenue generation
- Business partnerships
- And employee engagement
…it’s clear that they are “must haves” for effectively serving business constituents, especially in multilingual and international markets.
These buyers, partners and employees expect an immersive, fully localized UX-and they'll seek out other solutions when they don't get it. The stakes are high, and clear: Companies must bring their A-games to these localized experiences in order to grow their businesses.
But translating portals and login areas is much harder than it seems. In fact, the process is more challenging than localizing most public-facing websites (which are notoriously challenging on their own). That’s because:
- These sites use complex web applications, which are practically impossible for most vendors to properly localize
- They present dynamic content to users, which lives in databases that most vendors can’t parse
- Further, most vendors can’t control the scope or translation costs associated with these projects, making them prohibitively expensive
MotionPoint's solution is different-and better. Our superior content-detection technology and our content-parsing algorithm are two reasons why.
An Intro to Content Detection & Parsing
First, here's a quick primer on some tech terms. Translation providers use website crawlers, also called spiders, to identify translatable text and other translatable media within a portal.
Parsing algorithms are used to separate any translatable text from code. They then determine how to divide this content into easy-to-translate units of text called segments.
After the segments are translated, they’re stored in a special database called translation memory.
Complex Web Applications
Unfortunately, most portals use technologies that stymie web crawlers and parsing algorithms. For instance, many portals leverage sophisticated single-page applications, often powered by Angular or React. These complicated frameworks are too complex for most vendors’ tools.
Why? Even if those crawlers can make sense of JavaScript-which most can't-they can't reliably distinguish an application's translatable content from its code. This means:
- English words or phrases in JavaScript code that shouldn’t be translated are translated
- When these code phrases are mistakenly replaced with localized words, the application doesn’t work
- Further, not all of the application’s translatable segments may properly detected
- This means the application will only be partially translated, delivering an amateurish, alienating user experience
In contrast, MotionPoint has the know-how to properly parse these complex applications, accurately detect translatable segments, and seamlessly integrate all translations into the localized UX.
Dynamic Content
Portals also leverage dynamic content to make digital experiences highly relevant to users, such as presenting a customized UX based on a user’s account information. This dynamic content is often “hidden” in databases.
Other vendors haven’t developed the robust technologies nedded to proactively detect and translate these hundreds—or even thousands—of translatable segments. Instead, their content-detection technologies often recognize them only when they are actively generated and presented in real-time to users.
This means:
- Most of a portal’s translatable “hidden” dynamic text may not be detected at all
- When it is detected, it’s only after it’s been presented to an end user
- This means segments are routed for translation every time they’re generated, creating needless costs
- Even worse, this can occur even when the segment has already been previously translated, creating even more needless costs
In contrast, MotionPoint's technology seamlessly detects this database-driven content. We proactively translate all of this content once, store it in our translation memory and never have to translate it again. This means that no matter how many times the segment appears on-site, our customers are only charged once for its translation.
The localized content can be published an unlimited number of times, in any channel, at no additional cost.
Leveraging Segment Repetition
MotionPoint provides additional savings thanks to how our technologies handle dynamic content by increasing segment repetition.
Content that includes segment repetition often appears as sentences or headlines with predictable structures across multiple pages. Product descriptions that follow a template are a common example. So are templatized forms and questionnaires.
Our parser can be configured to recognize these patterns. Our linguists proactively translate this template-like structure and all of its contents. We then instruct our content-detection technology to ignore these "templatized" phrases on an ongoing basis, since they've already been translated.
Again, MotionPoint only needs to translate this content once. All translated segments can be republished an unlimited number of times at no additional cost.
Fine-Tuned Scope Control
Other vendors struggle to provide an accurate scope (often defined by word count) of a portal translation project. They also cannot control a project’s scope and its associated translation costs in ways that MotionPoint’s solution can.
MotionPoint's superior content detection technology provides accurate project scopes, and enables us to customize what content requires translation and what doesn't. For instance:
- We can exclude entire sections of a portal from translation to mitigate translation costs
- We can exclude translation on a per-page basis, too
- We’re even able to exclude translation down to specific elements within a page
We can also apply different translation solutions in equally granular ways. Website sections, pages or on-page elements can be translated by humans, by machine translation software, or a combination of the two.
Conclusion
All portal translation vendors use a content-parsing algorithm of some sort, but not all are created equal.
Only MotionPoint’s solution offers the kind of superior technologies and know-how needed to parse the complex frameworks that power secure portals, and provide the level of service required for the daily rigors of digital content translation.
Last updated on April 29, 2020
