A Solution for Efficient Help Centre Translations

As an entry-level technical writer, I designed a tool and process for translations. My effort decreased translation batch processing time from days to minutes and enabled a 100% translation rate across all help centers.

A tablet with help center content on it. A user is appearing to select French from a dropdown menu.

Project

With great content comes great translations

At Lightspeed our team of six needed to professionally translate all our content. Translations were important but were becoming difficult and time consuming.

Our team was put in charge of all content at Lightspeed to improve its consistency and quality. In 2019, we had three technical writers, a content designer, a manager and our newest member: a translation coordinator. To serve the needs of a global company, we needed to translate all content professionally. But translations were becoming a big issue, being an English company founded in Quebec, and having an ever growing global and multilingual customer base. As the translation process was very time consuming and manual, the time to translate was becoming very costly to the team.

Objective

Reduce errors and improve results

The goals were to solve the problem of translation in my help center, to reduce HTML errors, and to make translations more efficient.

Fix the ecommerce help center's translation issues. It was most recently acquired, had more languages, and was the furthest behind on translation completeness.
Find a way to translate without creating HTML errors. The current methods of flagging, translating and returning content to the help center would tend create challenging HTML and CSS errors.
Find a more efficient way to translate. The current process involved copy/paste and was very manual. Often a batch of articles would take one to two days to process.

Work

Standardization enables scale

By researching the software used by translators, helpful features were found enabled new standards and tools. The new process was documented for the team.

We discovered the translator’s software could detect HTML flags indicating the translation. By sending an article’s HTML source code for translation, the process became streamlined. I standardized HTML file name by ensuring it was always written in the same way, with the article ID, the help center and the language. With this, I created an Excel tool that simplified the return of translations to the help center. It generated links to the article’s edit page based on the file name's article id. I created internal documentation outlining the process to transition the rest of the technical writers to the same process.

End Result

Error-free, comprehensive translations

A faster process helped us reach our translation goals, and could be managed by one.

We reduced translation time cost to less than an hour per batch through the prevention HTML errors and standardization.
We increased user satisfaction and increased call centre deflection by reaching 100% translated content within a few months.
We increased productivity of our technical writers as our translation coordinator could now manage translations alone.

Reflection

Change management through results

Even a successful process can have change management challenges. I learned to resolve issues early by working on problems more closely with the team.

I learned that change management can be challenging. Talking about the new process and its merits did not enable change. To convince the team, I had to walk the talk by sending weekly translations and reaching 100% translated content. I’ve learned that you should review any standardized formats before launching a solution with the team before they become cemented into a process and difficult to change. For example, one team member noted that the standardized HTML file name were a little long. It would have been even more efficient to shorten them.