Localization for the Automotive Industry: Keeping it Consistent
CiklopeaCars. They are complex, sophisticated and ubiquitous. Their build quality and safety features are extremely important in our everyday lives. Yet, much of what we need to know when purchasing a car is contained in its brand – luxurious, family, sport cars, SUVs (and more) are all safely tucked in the brand names whose reputation has been carefully developed for decades. And it is probably true that for most of these decades, the localization requirements of the automotive industry were mostly limited to marketing materials and user manuals. But all things change.
So, what is it that we as localization professionals can do to help the growth of the automotive industry in the 2020s?
Marketing materials
The most obvious is the localization of marketing materials. All those elegant ads on TV and in magazines, billboards, websites, sales brochures and more are localized to help the brands’ global success and penetration.
In-car software
Vehicles are becoming increasingly digitized, the promise of fully autonomous cars is lurking over the horizon, and an entire ecosystem of software solutions for cars and driving has been developed that, just like any other software, requires localization.
Advanced driver-assistance systems (ADAS), GPS navigation, onboard digital systems, Human-Machine Interfaces (HMI), smartphone apps and various connectivity solutions – everything needs to be localized for the safest and best user experience on the global markets.
Owner’s manuals
Owner’s manuals, service wallets, brochures and other printed materials are translated and localized to provide global users and technicians with the necessary information about the car features.
Click to view Why Localize? – The 3P Model by Ciklopea [Infographic]
The gift of consistency
We have already mentioned the extremely close connection between the brand image and the products in the automotive industry. One of the features of every good brand is the consistency of its message on all levels and the available language technologies can be used to help the car manufacturers create and maintain a unified user experience across their products and platforms.
Of course, we are talking about the lexical and stylistic consistency of all materials – from ads to in-car software and printed technical documents.
The highly developed translation technology enables us to achieve full consistency through development and utilization of termbases, databases that contain client-approved translations of specific terms and other translation assets such as translation memories and glossaries that help maintain full structural, technical, stylistic and lexical consistency across different materials.
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Further benefits of translation technologies
Translation technologies enable full utilization of professional human knowledge and, in addition to achieving and maintaining consistency, they help us develop and use digital translation assets that optimize costs and shorten the turnaround time of localization.
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