If you serve a wide range of customers from all over the world, having a multilingual knowledge base is essential. Languages such as Mandarin Chinese, Hindi and Spanish are quickly catching up with English in terms of speakers around the world. This presents a significant opportunity for businesses to expand their reach and engage with these markets.
A well-designed multilingual knowledge base can help you standardize processes across your global entities, improve customer support , and build trust with your international audience. However, creating and maintaining a multilingual knowledge base is challenging without the right tools in your arsenal.
Let’s explore best practices for building and optimizing your multilingual knowledge base for long-term success.
What is a multilingual knowledge base?
Imagine how much easier it would be to help customers or train employees if you had a knowledge base they could access in their native language. That’s the power of going multilingual with your knowledge base.
A multilingual knowledge base is a collection of information that is available in multiple languages. It’s like having a library with the same books in different languages: you can find the information you need no matter what language you speak.
For a global organization, a multilingual knowledge base is extremely useful because it allows you to share knowledge and information with people all over the world. It’s a great way to break down language barriers and ensure that everyone has access to the same important information.
The most common things you’ll find in a multilingual knowledge base are product guides, FAQs, troubleshooting tips, and help articles — basically, anything your customers or employees need to know about your company, products, or services. You can also include internal content assets like training materials, onboarding guides, and HR policies, so everyone has access to the information they need in their preferred language.
Why create a multilingual knowledge base?
A knowledge base is a centralized repository of information that has multiple use cases. Here’s how making your knowledge base available in multiple languages can help you delight your customers and employees:
Provide effective customer support
Research shows that 42% of customers churn due to a poor customer support experience. If you have customers from different countries and languages, a multilingual knowledge base is essential for your customer support.
When your knowledge base articles are available in multiple languages, your support team can quickly direct the right information to customers, no matter what language they speak. This saves time and frustration for both your agents and your customers.
Additionally, a knowledge base can also function as a self-service helpdesk, where customers can access the information they need in their native language without your staff having to lift a finger. This is especially important for complex technical topics where misunderstandings can be costly. For example, if a customer misunderstands safety instructions and an incident occurs, the company could face liability issues. Multilingual customer supportMultilingual customer support (Source)
The bottom line is that a multilingual knowledge base makes it easier for your support team to provide excellent service to your entire global customer base. It’s a smart investment that pays off in happier customers and more efficient multilingual support operations.
Empower your workforce
For international companies, one of the significant challenges is ensuring that all employees, regardless of their location, can access vital company information. A multilingual knowledge base serves as a centralized repository dominican republic whatsapp number data 5 million that addresses this issue by providing resources in multiple languages.
Employees can quickly find the information they need to do their jobs, even if they’re not fluent in the content’s original language. This increases productivity and reduces the time they spend searching for answers. A multinational company can give all employees access to the same company training materials and knowledge in their preferred languages.
Expand your reach
By making your content accessible to a wider audience, you can enter new markets and increase your visibility. This is especially crucial in regions where language barriers can be a significant obstacle. For example, a company like Airbnb, which ukraine’s path to the eu: where are we now? offers its customer support page in over 20 languages, has been able to attract a diverse range of users from different parts of the world. Airbnb Customer Support Language OptionsAirbnb’s customer support portal is available in over 20 languages ( Source ).
Additionally, customers often search for answers to their questions using a search engine in their native language. A multilingual knowledge base can improve your search engine optimization (SEO) and attract more organic traffic from international search engines.
How to create a multilingual knowledge base
Creating a multilingual knowledge base is a challenging task: you need the right tools and strategies to succeed. Let’s look at six specific steps fax marketing to creating and maintaining an effective multilingual knowledge base:
1. Determine the languages to be supported
Start by creating a default language database that will serve as the foundation for your knowledge base. This default language should be the primary language of your support team and the language in which you initially create your content.
When choosing new languages to support in a multilingual knowledge base, there are several important factors to consider: The language proficiency of your support team: Make sure you have support team members who can speak the target language fluently.
Customer demographics: Analyze the demographics of your customer base and review the customer inquiries you frequently receive. Additionally, if you are receiving significant traffic from certain regions with high bounce rates, this may indicate the need to translate articles into those languages.
Site language support: Make sure you already support the language on your site before translating your knowledge base articles.
2. Use a translation management system (TMS)
A TMS is a powerful platform that helps global companies create and maintain their multilingual knowledge base. Here’s how a TMS can make managing a multilingual knowledge base easier:
Centralized project management: A TMS allows companies to manage all translated articles and projects in one place. Everything from product descriptions to customer support documents is easily accessible from a single view. It also keeps track of all changes to the content so that the latest version is always available.
Automated translation workflows: Companies can automate the translation process, especially operational aspects such as uploading and extraction. This saves time and reduces costs by eliminating the need for manual intervention.
>Quality checks: Most modern TMSs come with built-in quality checks and allow companies to define specific translation guidelines and review processes to maintain consistency across languages.
>Integrations with your existing systems: TMSs can integrate with other business systems, such as content management systems and customer relationship management systems, facilitating knowledge management.
Want to learn more about TMSs? Here’s a detailed guide on what a TMS is and how to choose one .
3. Select the correct translation method
The translation industry is experiencing rapid growth. Today, there are several different translation methods to choose from. However, there are also factors to consider when choosing the right translation method. For example, if your content is highly specialized, creative, or culturally sensitive, work with professional translators or native speakers who can better understand cultural nuances and technical accuracy. On the other hand, AI translation tools like machine translation can easily handle simple and routine content.
Plus, when working with AI, you no longer have to worry about quality. AI-powered translations are now considerably more advanced and produce high-quality results. For example, if you’re concerned about how AI can adapt to your brand tone and are wondering when to involve human oversight (and when not to), we’ll cover this extensively in our Reality Series: Episode 4 .
Olga Beregovaya, VP of AI at Smartling, shares that “translation, editing, and proofreading — as we know them — definitely seem to be becoming more and more a thing of the past. […] And what we see is that the quality of even the first pass [of machine-translated content] is already high enough, unless you’re dealing with very specialized content or content that requires transcreation. […] [So] the quality predictions [of the output] from machine learning models are already a great indicator of where you need that second set of eyes or not.”
4. Localize all your content
When you’re ready to set up your knowledge base in multiple languages, it’s crucial that you localize your content. This means translating and adapting each piece of information to match the target language and culture. Make sure your translations are accurate, natural-sounding, and culturally appropriate. Also, don’t forget to leave extra space in your web layouts for languages that expand when translated (like English to German).
Multimedia localization can be tricky, considering there’s subtitling and dubbing involved in the process. However, with the right translation services, like Smartling’s full-service video translation service , you can navigate the process and get perfectly localized media content.
5. Make your knowledge base easy to use
Customer experience is a top priority when you’re creating a large resource like a knowledge base. Use a simple, intuitive navigation system with clear categories and tags to avoid overwhelming users with too many options. Organize your content well with a logical flow from one topic to the next.
Another way to make users feel valued is to provide a way to provide feedback or ask questions if they can’t find the answer they need. Here’s how Microsoft does this at the end of each help article: knowledge base feedback.