🧑‍🏫 | Stakeholder Education

What is a Stakeholder?

Anyone you work with that directly impacts your work. In localization, these are the people who "send us work".
For example:

• Marketing
• Legal
• Helpcenter
• Product

What about Stakeholder Education?

Stakeholder Education is something that helps stakeholders understand the benefits and requirements of localization.

This includes but not limited to:

• Minimum Turnaround Times & The Risks if there's not one;
• Reference Material Requirements;
• Cultural/Locale-Specific Nuances that are best to avoid or to improve;
• ...

Example of Stakeholder Education

• Email Correspondence
  Engage to explain: I can't do it because...
• Localizability Checks
  When issues found in Localizability check, report back to avoid another inappropriate element in the future
• Informal Coffee Chats
  Build good relationships with your stakeholder
• Localization Website or Hub with Information^[1]
• Brown-bag Presentations^[2]

[1] Creating a Hub for Localization Resources:

Internal Wiki

• • • Text Heavy Design
    • Good for Product Stakeholders
      - Release Schedules
      - Turnaround Times
      - Process Documents
      - ...

Display Hub Sites

• • • More User Friendly
      
    • More Oriented for your Creative Stakeholders
    • Split things up for different teams! Make them feel relevant
      - Release Schedules
      - Turnaround Times
      - Process Documents
      - ...

[2] Brown-bag Presentation

—— Happen anytime in a day (originally lunch time), with topics like:

• General (Raise Awareness)
  What is localization/Who are we?
• Specific (Fine tuning how we work with other teams)
  Marketing Process/Turnaround Time/etc.
• Refresher
  Something starting to go off course / New stakeholders joined and not following ...
• Extremely Specific
  Just on one topic, eg: Localizability Checks...

Brown-bag Agenda

Introduction

Team Structure:

• • How many language do you cover?
  • Who is Who on your team?
  • What does your localization organization (l10n team structure) look like?

An example topic here

• What content you support
• What service you provide
• Localization Workflow about this topic
  - What's our localization plan? (Foresee if there's any red flags we could prevent)
    It's crucial to share a 3 month roadmap of upcoming project and share individual project plans as soon as your teams starts drafting them, so the LPM can ask questions about your projects (scope/content/launch countries/locales/date); put together localization strategy and timeline; reserve localization resources to ensure launch date is met.
  - How you will send us a request (Ensure the only intake via mail/instant message/etc)
  - How long does it take? Set a minmum turnaround time around 48 hours no matter how small the task is. To consider these factors that might influence: Volume; Asset type; File Format; Transcreation; Priority; Timezone Difference
  - Localize: how and when you collaborate with your localization team.

Tips and Best Practices

• Cultural Check
• Detailed Request
• Clean Source File:
  - Always provide editable source file (.fig, AE, etc.)
  - Remove content/layers/frames that does not need translation;
  - Remove irrelevant files in the source file package/toolkit folder

Resources