Looking for the best translation software for marketing agencies? Before you settle on a content localization platform, there are a few factors you need to consider.

First, it’s important to define exactly what you want the software to help your agency with.

Do you need to streamline your translation workflow? Are you looking to save time on the translation process? Or, perhaps you want a project management space for your team to access the last version of all of your translated marketing materials in one place.

Even if you’re still not 100% certain about what you’re looking for, this article should help you. We’re not going to start by naming the best translation software for marketing agencies, because that depends on your marketing agency’s specific needs.

Instead, we’ll first present you with the features that are commonly the most helpful to marketing professionals. Then, we’ll make a recommendation for the best translation software for marketing agencies at the end of this article.

11 Essential Features of the Best Translation Software for Marketing Agencies

Below are the features most commonly found in the best translation software for marketing agencies. These are based on the assumption that all marketing agencies and marketing departments value high-quality translation and integrity of file formatting, as well as time and cost-savings.

1. Automatic File Formatting

The best translation software for marketing agencies often includes automatic file formatting.

When you upload a file to translation software, you don’t want to spend hours reformatting its appearance. Regardless of whether it’s an entire PowerPoint, InDesign file, or Microsoft Word document.

However, that’s the reality for users of many translation platforms who are still wasting time and energy cutting and pasting text into Excel worksheets. When you work in marketing, this becomes a bottleneck, because you need translated marketing materials to be publishable. And in marketing, you have really fast deadlines to meet.

With this feature, your department can save hours of work that you would normally spend reformatting a file. Font properties, images, spacing and breaks all remain intact. Spend minutes tweaking a layout instead of hours and days reformatting a file.

This feature is particularly useful for the following marketing materials, which require absolute publishability:

• Display ads
• Print ads
• Infographics
• Pinterest Pins
• Social media images
• PDF’s
• Brochures
• One-pagers
• eBooks & other downloadables
• Brand books
• Email campaigns
• InDesign files

Did we mention this feature will help reduce the labor hours associated with producing a translated marketing deliverable at your agency?

2. Dynamic Machine Learning and Translation Memory

When evaluating a translation system to drastically reduce translation costs, improve translation quality and efficiency, look for software that harnesses the power of Translation Memory (TM) and Dynamic Machine Learning (DML). This pair is particularly helpful if your marketing agency aims to reduce costs and long-term workload. 

Translation Memory for Marketing Content

Translation Memory will improve your productivity, by allowing you to store and reuse edited translations. This will reduce hours and effort for future projects and maintain consistent quality.  

By using TM, you can also avoid common brand challenges, such as varying translations of taglines. Consistency for marketing is critical to position yourself firmly in your brand, which is why TM is an important translating feature for marketing agencies. 

Using Dynamic Machine Learning for Continuous Improvement

In addition, dynamic machine learning will further improve the translation process. This feature allows your team to simultaneously apply translation edits to multiple files and continuously improve translation quality as the edits are made. 

Furthermore, as your team continues to train the software with each edit, the system learns and improves, leading to progressively higher-quality translations. 

Over time, this reduces the amount of content that needs manual editing, cutting costs and saving time on translation, both in the short and long term.

3. Project Management

The best translation software for marketing agencies and departments will also include a strong project management component.

It’s important that your translation software facilitates team collaboration.

Specific capabilities to look for include:

• Translation edit history
• User permissions control
• Translation Memory access by group
• Invite translation professionals into the platform from within the user interface

These capabilities will streamline team productivity and keep the latest version of a translation accessible to everyone without needing to email file attachments back and forth.

4. Batch File Translation

Another feature of the best translation software for marketing agencies is batch file translation.

Batch file translation allows you to swiftly upload multiple files at once. It also allows you to edit first-draft translations across one of the files and have the edits automatically applied to the same text that exists across the other files within the batch.

Integrated marketing communication calls for a unified experience of a brand’s messaging. So for any marketing campaign, you’re likely to have multiple files that share similar words and phrases.

Batch file translation will be your new best friend because you’ll be able to simultaneously upload an InDesign file, a spreadsheet with PPC ad copy, email HTML, a spreadsheet with social media text, an .SRT file of video captions, and so on, all in the same batch.

Edit one word or segment of text in a single document, and it will be applied across each one in the batch––regardless of the file type.

5. Dynamic Spellcheck

Spellcheck is a handy tool to use when you’re writing marketing copy. Wouldn’t it be helpful if when you correct one word, it corrects all similar errors across a file or batch of files? Well, that’s exactly what dynamic spellcheck does.

6. Access to a Robust, Feature-Rich API

The best translation software for marketing agencies will also include access to its application programming interface (API). A premium translation API will provide more functionality to your marketing agency than simply delivering raw machine translation. All the above features should be available via API calls.

Having access to a robust API means you give other software systems in use by your agency more than just access to raw translations. You can deliver high-quality, human-edited translations and updated content to other programs, which will save your company time and money.

For instance, think about a website. Would you be using the best translation software for marketing agencies if you delivered raw translations to your client’s CMS? Or would you want human-quality level translations that result in a great conversion rate?

That’s the difference between many translation plugins and a premium translation API.

7. Web Access and Multi-Device Accessibility

Scalability, flexibility, and productivity is important for coordinating with a team across the world. Centralizing your translation projects is best done by choosing web-accessible translation software.

This way, all your source language files, and target language files will be accessible from one centralized hub.

What’s more, there is no clunky software on your desktop to maintain or manage, and you can access your translations on-the-go whether you’re on a Mac, Windows or Android device.

8. Gisting

The best translation software for marketing agencies should also include a gisting feature that allows you to quickly copy and paste text for translation. This is helpful for when you only need to translate a sentence or small amount of text, such as from an email or chat.

9. Live Tech Support

A live human. That’s who you should be speaking with when you jump on a chat for help with your translation system. Make sure that any translation application you consider will give you live customer support.

Ultimately, this will save you time. When you chat with a live agent, you get quicker, higher-quality support when it comes to troubleshooting problematic files and onboarding users.

10. Google Drive Integration 

Does your marketing agency have a lot of files to juggle for each project? Look for translation software with Google Drive integration. 

As all marketing projects go, one project could mean working with several files at once. The time that your team loses to downloading the files from Drive, importing them to translation software and then and re-uploading them to Drive adds up. It’s a waste of your team’s time! 

With translation software that has direct access to Google Drive, your team can quickly translate and collaborate on translating marketing content without the need for manual uploads or downloads. 

This should ideally support various Google file formats, ensuring that all types of marketing content, from presentations to reports, are easily accessible and translatable within the platform. 

A streamlined process like this will not only save time, but boost productivity with real-time collaboration a fast-paced marketing environment.  

11. OpenAI Integration

To improve translation quality and productivity, you can leverage advanced language models by using translation software integrated with OpenAI. An integration like this could provide access to a premium ChatGPT experience right within the translation application. 

Why Your Designers will Also Love this

This can assist your team to reduce the character count of translated text segments, which can help maintain the layout of translated files to match the source. This is particularly useful for language growth issues in translations (e.g., English to Spanish). 

Language growth issues commonly disrupt visual layout and cause headaches for your designers who will need to revisit the layout of translated InDesign files, for instance.

Your Super-Productive Translation Assistant

Additionally, the ability to generate alternative translations and perform quick research directly within the translation tool streamlines the workflow. This is especially helpful for your marketing agency, as it will allow you to produce creative and contextually accurate content efficiently and swiftly.

No Matter What, Always Strive for High-Quality Translation

If you want the ultimate best translation software for marketing agencies, keep in mind that using high-quality translation in marketing copy can improve click-through-rates, open rates and conversion rates. This, combined with saving time and money by using productivity features, will put your marketing team in a position of success.

Recommended Translation Software for Marketing Agencies

Try Pairaphrase. It’s the AI-powered translation management system for marketing teams who value faster, smarter and safer translation. What’s more, it includes all the capabilities listed above, plus more.

Pairaphrase supports 100+ languages and 10,000+ language pairs including Spanish, French, German, Arabic, Hindi, Chinese, Japanese and more. Not to mention, it performs file translation for 24 file types.

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