Source Content Quality. 5 tips for improving your content copy

The other day I was visited by a friend who had not seen for almost a year, the situation that we are all living with COVID greatly hinders the possibilities of socializing in the real world! (It was nice to see people outside of Zoom or Google Meet!)

He brought me some craft beers that he has been preparing for the last few months.

The truth is that the passion for craft beers has grown a lot in recent years around here, and my friend took the opportunity to improve his beer recipe during all those weeks that we spent in Spain locked up at home between March and June.

He had already been producing his beer since 2017, but during those months he took the opportunity to improve his recipe, and he was explaining to me that deep down the most important thing to obtaining good beers are the grains.

With the personal and judicious use of steeped specialty grains, brewers can make this product even finer.

 They can customize a brew; they can focus on nuances. And specialty grains are the way to really fine-tune malt flavor.

Well, the truth is that I think my friend has got the hang of making homemade beer, how delicious it was!☺️

Turns out there are many ways to brew beer. But if you don’t begin with the right, quality grains, there’s little you can do to improve it. It occurred to me this applies to content creation, doesn’t it? 

If you don’t have the right inputs, there’s little even a great Localization team can do to produce great localized content.

A process to enhance Source Content Quality is the secret sauce to get high quality localized content, that’s how you prepare the right input for our localization process.

 Clearly bad source content will always result in bad localization.

So, this week I want to cover what you should take into consideration to guarantee that the Source Content is top-notch quality.

There are 5 main areas that affect source content

Source Content Quality: source @yolocalizo HERE to download the infographic

Structure

• Structure of internal teams producing content (Product Development, Product Marketing, and Content Creation teams)

• Access to central brand guidelines and  standardized style guides

• Content ownership governance

Clarity 

• Is the content understandable to customers?

• Is the content organized logically & coherently?

• Is the content correct?

• Does the content contain factual errors, typos, or grammatical errors?

• Do images, video, and audio meet technical standards, so they are clear?

Voice and Style

• Does the content consistently reflect brand voice?

• Does its tone adjust appropriately to the context—for example, video games must have a different style than customer service?

• Does the content convey the appropriate brand qualities?

• Does the content seem to have a style? If so, does the content adhere to it consistently?

• Does the content read, look, or sound as though it’s professionally crafted?

• Is the content inclusive? Is written for everyone?

• Is the target audience clearly identified?

• Is it clear the criteria to define brand terms?

• Are the local requirements such as time, date, currencies, and the measurement units clearly standardized?

• Is the use of the language clearly defined (acronyms, abbreviations, punctuation, length limitations, and grammar)

Glossary

• Is it specified which terms will be kept in English?

• Are the criteria to use acronyms in place?

• Is it defined the mining and update process?

Global Mindset

• Is the source content simple? Remember keep it simple. Less is more!

• Is the present tense the predominant tense used in the source content?

• Is active voice used in the source content?

• Is there any expression that might be considered either too local or being perceived as slang?

• Have been used any cross-cultural references that might be perceived as offensive for certain regions?

• Are flags or symbols used in the source copy that might cause problems of perception during the localization phase?

In summary

Improving the quality of your source content is the first step to ensure the quality of your localized content.

To optimize your content from the start you must force yourself to answer all the questions that I shape in this article, ultimately, considering your global audience from the start will save time and money and it’ll level up the perception of your content quality across all the different markets. 

 Writing this post makes me thirsty, I'm going to have a beer, I still have 2 of the ones that my friend brought me!

Happy week everyone!

@yolocalizo