Delegating localization to distributors and VARs?

We often talk to prospective clients that are interested in localizing their products and are looking at having their international distributors or value added resellers (VARs) perform their product localization.

Distributors or VARs often hold excellent knowledge of the country they operate in. They are also experts at the products they sell.

The logic that we hear from our prospective clients is that VARs are supposed to add value to the product and localizing it seems like a good place to start. So why involve another party and incur the cost at the corporate level?

Well, there are pros for having your distributors and VARs perform the localization of your product. But these pros are quickly negated by serious cons that companies should not ignore. So make sure you are well informed.

Your resellers’ primary tasks are to promote and sell your product. The staffs that run your distribution channel are sales and field professionals, not professional translators and localizers. Delegating to distributors can lead to the availability of a localized product but at the cost of potentially losing control over time-to-market, ownership and quality.

1. Time-to-Market. Your distributors’ job is to promote and sell. Any other activity that distracts them from doing that is likely to be neglected. As a result, delays are to be expected when distributors are delegated product development tasks such as product localization.

2. Ownership. Ownership may be an issue if you become interested in adding resellers or a direct sales force in the same region as the reseller who has paid for or performed the localization. You may be put in a position to buy back the localized material or to have to re-localize it, inconveniencing your users with two localized versions of your product.

3. Quality. Resellers often do not have the resources, the process knowledge or the experience to perform quality localization. Yes they know the product and its local terminology, but they often lack writing and translation skills, which is over 60% of the localization effort. Counting on them to perform all the localization tasks may have severe consequences on your brand’s quality and reputation in that geographical market.

The best localization process is the one that can benefit from your distributors’ product, terminology and user knowledge without bogging them down with demanding translation tasks.

This is why we always recommend hiring a localization vendor or group that can leverage your distribution channel’s strengths via a translation collaboration portal, while answering to your product development team that is in charge of your product’s release.

After all, it is product development that should be delegated authority over localization and the delivery of your product on schedule and within your corporate quality standards, not your international sales channel!

Too many cooks

Our team just finished delivering a large project to one of our clients where both quality and schedule were essential.

With localization, the schedule typically drives the need for resources. We apply a sophisticated mathematical model to derive the number of people required and the project plan needed to complete the project on time.

Many of our clients consider this a linear model — when a schedule slips on their end, they push us to apply more resources to offset their delay and deliver according to the initial schedule. They formulate their argument around scalability: “It is very important for us that you are constantly growing and providing us scalability.”

But what our clients chose to overlook is the limit of the number of resources that can be thrown at a project before impacting its quality.

Capacity is not the only issue to consider in localization, particularly when most clients often want their projects done yesterday!

Most localization companies have hundreds or thousands of contractors helping them with their projects when needed. We processed projects of over a million words in just a few weeks for that same client’s customer support group a few months earlier. But the uses and users of knowledge-bases are different from the uses and users of a website and marketing collateral, and different still from the uses and users of a software User Interface...

The quality of a localization project is typically not determined by the expectations of our client, but instead by their end-users. This should be the primary driving factor of success, not the delivery schedule. What good will your localized products be if they are released on time, but are not understood by your users?

After we analyzed the overall schedule needs for our client, we strove to allocate the localization team the time required to complete that project according to the quality anticipated by its users.

After a few long execution weeks, our client wrote us the following: “With all the efforts from your team, we have been able to deliver these files in time and in good quality [...]. We want to let you know that we really appreciate all the hard work you have put in these projects. Well done!”

Localized files were delivered later than the initial localization schedule called for, yet within overall product rollout requirements. More importantly, files were delivered according to the expected quality standards.

Like most tasks, there is often a limit to the number of resources you can throw at localization projects, reminding us of the old adage: Too many cooks spoil the broth! It always pays to seek an expert opinion before committing to a schedule.