The average U.S. software developer commands an annual salary of $90,156*. Promote that person to software engineering manager and they’ll earn an average of $122,570 each year. Move them to San Francisco and the figure jumps to $141,223.
Considering the investment today’s companies are making in IT talent, each tedious task that distracts developers from their primary duties is now a corner-office concern. And this new reality is forcing executives to make difficult decisions regarding global expansion.
Is Localizing Monopolizing Your Time?
Whether your business sells handmade sweaters, healthcare services, or hotel suites, you’re more likely to connect with global customers if your content speaks their language. And if any of your words are published on a digital platform, you’ll need experienced developers to assist with your multilingual transformation.
Text translation is only the tip of the iceberg when it comes to executing an effective global content strategy. You also need to consider the containers your content lives inside. Unfortunately, not every content management system is set up to support multilingual content out of the box. And when it isn’t, it may take your developers months or years to internationalize all the underlying code.
Even if that’s complete, there may still be the matter of manually scraping text strings out of your source code and pasting them into spreadsheets that translators can comprehend. Then, once the translations are complete, developers will likely have to execute or monitor new content uploads to ensure the site or app doesn’t break.
This frustrating process will only get worse when ambitious companies add more content, support more languages, and publish in more formats. And for many IT leaders, localization is already a four-letter word they loathe.
Liberation Through Automation
So who could possibly save developers from tedious distractions and pave the way for more productive workdays? Developers, naturally.
In recent years, several technology innovations have emerged to eliminate the localization requirements developers dread most. A translation proxy, for instance, can help team bypass the internationalization process entirely. At the same, this software-based solution instantly ingests source content into a translator’s workspace and automatically pushes it back to its corresponding content management platform once complete.
IT teams can achieve similar results by leveraging proprietary connectors or custom API solutions as well. And when they do, the downstream impact of this newfound developer bandwidth can have dramatic business results.
Intercontinental Hotels Group, for example, was able to double its number of language launches year over year while simultaneously building an enhanced digital guest experience. Find out how in the video below.
*All salary data derived from Indeed.com in July 2017.
