Global DAMs support multiple languages

Working with software that supports multiple languages in global organizations

How do you make sure marketing operations and sharing digital assets works efficiently across geographic regions? A multilingual company needs multilingual (marketing) software. A digital asset management solution that supports multiple languages and includes automatic translations of asset tags is a necessity for a multilingual organization and helps your marketing operations run smoother. 

Most companies that are present in several countries and continents have introduced a multilingual approach to their internal operations. Introducing several working languages into your company has its benefits but it also requires you to consider the translation and language capabilities of your software.  

Wouldn’t it be easier to just have one official corporate language? 

While English for example enjoys the status of an official global language, it is generally estimated that 70-90% of the population don’t speak it at all. Even those of us who did study the lingua franca as a second language during our basic education don’t necessarily speak or read it fluently. This can become a problem in organizations that have offices in multiple countries.  

Only hiring people who have a near-native level of comprehension of English is not inclusive – especially if these people’s roles don’t really require them to use any other language than their own and if they rarely communicate with colleagues who don’t speak their native language.  

In some countries and industries, it can be close to impossible to find personnel that have sufficient English skills. For example, China is one of the largest economies by any standards but less that 10% of the inhabitants speak English. Should a company then not have operations in China just because of the language barrier? Most companies find ways to overcome linguistic obstacles in the pursuit of growth and financial gain.  

A multilingual company needs multilingual software  

Whether it be out of a regard or an appreciation of the complexity of culture or out of convenience, the fact remains that most global companies operate in several languages. This means that these organizations don’t simply allow email and document exchanges to happen in many languages – instead it brings many practical hurdles in global internal communication.  

All memos, town halls, newsletters, etc. need to be translated, of course, but what many of us forget is that all software that is used by various regional offices, or even just external agencies, needs to work for people with different mother tongues. 

A global DAM supports all users 

When you are choosing a DAM to streamline your marketing operations and to enable your people to be more efficient, make sure that it supports the languages that the users speak or use in their work. Lytho, for example, is a global DAM solution which supports a dozen different languages, including Spanish, Dutch, English, German, French, Portuguese, Italian, Russian and more.  

This means that all the user functionalities like dashboards, menus and selection bar text fields can be shown in different languages. But what happens when users are looking for a file or an image in their native tongue, but that file has been tagged by someone in another language?  

Lytho has a Translation Manager built in which can be used to automatically translate tags.  

Automatic tag translation 

How does automatic tag translation work? A tag will always be created in the source language, for instance, an image of a plane would be tagged in English as 'airplane'. This tag 'airplane' would be used by admins to tag all files that feature planes.  

This tag can then be translated to 'Vliegtuig' and assigned to the language 'Dutch' using the Lytho Translation Manager. A Dutch user can now search 'vliegtuig' in their native language while an English user will see the same image, but with the label 'airplane'. You only have to assign one tag and the Translation Manager will do the rest.  

To save time on manual input for the translation of tags, it is possible to upload the various translations from an excel file. The Translation Manager will do the rest of the work, automatically and in the background – anytime someone searches for an image with a specific task. 

Being able to work together in the same platform and access the same files but in different languages eliminates the need for a lot of duplicates and misunderstanding and can save your organization countless working hours in re-creating assets and libraries. It will also boost your marketing consistency and make sure that your brand has the same look and feel in different regions.  

Want to learn more about how a global DAM could help you? 

If you’d like to explore more how a DAM will benefit your multilingual organization and make creating new marketing collateral a walk in the park, get in touch with our experts for a demo! It's free and online and takes up no more than about 20 minutes.