You need to deploy marketing materials in a timely and cost effective manner, across multiple languages and multiple media, whilst maintaining consistency of content across languages and media.

The Issues

Cost of translation into multiple languages
- Translation costs rise as special skills are required (e.g. HTML knowledge), and it is difficult to use in-house foreign language speakers/translators if they do not have specialist skills.

Presentation of unique content to different markets
- You may wish to present unique content to different language markets; but you still need to maintain an oversight of all current content in a master language.

Goals
- Reduce cost by removing skill set required of translator 
- Present unique content by language if required.

How it is done
(see downloads below for flow charts/diagrams).

A master language is set in the content management system (in our case English). Web content is initially loaded in English only. Required content can then be translated into target languages within the CMS with NO SPECIAL HTML KNOWLEDGE. The HTML skill requirement has been removed, the translator is essentially using the same skills as he/she would using a word processor. All relevant unique HTML code is automatically loaded by the system (e.g. charset, font encodings etc.). This also permits the use of in-house staff for rapid updating/content editing where the language skill sets are present.

Where you want to present one set of content to one language market, but a different set of content to a different market (e.g. terms and conditions documents, different products etc.), a master of each is first created in the default language. This guarantees a central, monolingual master catalogue of all materials. This default language version can be disabled to prevent viewing from outside the administration system. The unique content is then translated into the required target language(s) and these screens are enabled, presenting only the translated unique content to the target market.