In the present global environment, the companies are pressed more than ever to offer a personalized and intimate experience to all the customers. This includes providing localized content for users of different languages and nationalities. However, this feature is mostly overlooked in the CMS (content management systems). Given the fact that the customers are more likely to buy from the websites in their language, it should be a must for the sites to offer some kind of localization solution for the purpose of remaining in the competition in the global stage. The following is a brief idea on the qualities that a CMS needs to have and the way it can support content localization in the present systems.

Translation of the content

Starting at the fundamental level, the system needs to have the ability to store and providing the customer content in more than one language. In the present time, this feature of content localization is seen mostly in all the systems, whether it is through the use of plugins or out of the box solutions.

Assets and taxonomies

Not all assets are translatable as easily. For instance, the taxonomies are usually handled differently than individual pages or posts. Thus, the CMS needs to develop separate processes to offer the translation of each of the taxonomical term. Assets like PDFs and images are even more difficult to handle because of the multiple cases of the requirement of the same asset to be uploaded based on whether there is content localization done on it. An excellent CMS would offer a way for organizing the assets such that the original is always available. For instance, a PSD can be easily grouped and uploaded with the derivatives such that a new localized variety can be offered by the marketing team.

Configurations and administrator panels

The admin panel might or might not require being localized depending on if it has globalized contributors or based on the nature of the business. Most of the CMSs allow multiple languages and have the capability to offer extensive support. However, modules and plugins written by the third parties usually do not offer the same support as you will get from a complete CMS. So, you need to be careful while choosing the management system that relies highly on the plugins.

Workflow

A strong workflow is crucial for offering a usable system for businesses that have big teams of editors and writers. It is important to mention that this kind of support is typically found in most of the CMSs. However, getting support for the workflow that works with the content localization is difficult to come across. Two very important aspects that come into play are update notifications and separation of the workflows.

Separation of the workflows

It is crucial for each of the languages to have a different workflow as it allows each of the languages to edit and publish the content irrespective of status held by the other languages. For instance, a website would usually look forward to publishing the English version of the page before Dutch or German versions of the content is yet to get translated.

In the same manner, each of the languages needs to have a separate set of permissions. This is significant if you only want the translators to get access to such content which is written in their language.

The update notification

Maintaining the synchronization between various translations is also a highly significant feature that a strong workflow needs to facilitate. Notifications must be pushed out to every relevant translator when the document is updated. This lets the translators update the content to depict the original.

Management of the non-translatable content

Maintenance of synchronized content is highly important, as mentioned above. Not all the content needs to get translated. But, things like numbers, images, and prices must be translated. In addition to that, it is important that the changes get automatically propagated to every language. Failing to do this, makes the translators dealing with the herculean job of keeping the data integrity.

Associated content

A CMS must also synchronize the related content, for instance, the likes, signups, votes, and event attendance. The information needs to get aggregated in some way so that the admins do not need to handle multiple data sources. Similarly, the administrators need to have the capability to single out the information using location and language. This is crucial for offering regional statistics, and, it further helps in making targeted content.

Comments

Finally, the CMS which offers multilingual facilities needs to have some kind of ability to deal with comments from different languages. In a perfect system, the comments could be synchronized and translated among different languages. This is not impossible, but difficult, to get in the present systems due to the inaccuracy showcased by machine translations and the high cost of hiring professional translators. Thus, efforts need to be made for ensuring that comments from different regions are separated out from one another so as to not let the user experience be affected.

Providing support for content localization is not an easy task. All of these features discussed here separate a management system from all others and makes it suited for business. So, keep the points mentioned here in mind when you start searching for a high-end management system for your content.