Top Benefits of Corporate Training Localization for Global Businesses

Globalization has significantly impacted most businesses, leading to the establishment of offices across multiple countries and continents. As organizations expand internationally, corporate training localization becomes essential to effectively engage teams and employees.

By tailoring training programs to align with diverse cultural and regional needs, businesses can shape company culture and implement strategies to thrive on a global scale. Such training includes management, soft and hard skills, compliance, and even equipping employees with equity, diversity, and inclusion knowledge.

What is Corporate Training?

Corporate training is a real game-changer. It is a phenomenon that is significant to an organization and its employees since it helps to boost employee productivity and also improves the company’s reputation and authority in its niche.

A corporate training program is the process of educating and exposing the staff of an organization to important knowledge and skills required for them to do their jobs more effectively. This entails frequently organizing physical seminars, eLearning programs, or providing training materials to employees.

What is Corporate Training Localization?

Meeting the learning needs of international employees is not a one-size-fits-all approach. Corporations with a diversified worldwide workforce must learn to localize training materials, learning environments, and teaching approaches to suit the teams’ and employees’ cultural and regional standards.

Corporate training localization goes beyond the translation of written content into the local language of employees. It is all about personalizing every aspect of the training material to appeal to the culture of the target audience. By adapting corporate training to align with linguistic and local contexts or preferences of employees, organizations can be assured of better understanding, engagement, retention, and assimilation of knowledge acquired during the training.

Types of Training Materials to be Adapted

1. Training Manuals
2. Instructor Guides
3. Presentation Slides
4. Quick Reference Materials
5. eLearning Videos
6. Job Aids

Five Benefits of Localizing Corporate Training

When a company expands its workforce internationally, it must also adapt its training programs to suit its diverse workforce. Training employees from different cultural backgrounds and languages requires implementing an effective localization strategy to give them the best learning experience.

Here are some top benefits of localizing corporate training programs.

1. Fosters Diversity and Inclusion

   As organizations expand beyond borders, localization of training programs no longer is optional, but becomes a necessity. Investing in a good localization strategy increases learning outcomes, leading to increased productivity. By fostering a sense of belonging and inclusivity, through the adaptation of training programs for different groups, employees will feel more respected and valued which reflects a great work culture that will boost employee loyalty.

2. Better Learning Outcome and Experience

   Localization efforts targeted at corporate and compliance training make learning more engaging. Adapting even the smallest elements like date, time, currency, and units of measurement formats can make learning more interesting, and boost employees’ motivation to learn.

3. Maintains Precision, Consistency, and Accuracy

   Localization of training materials is a sure way of preserving the core message of the training materials which could be misunderstood or lost by translation alone. Adapting educational content also eliminates misunderstandings and offense amongst offices with regional differences and adds uniformity to the content. For instance, some regions use right to left script layout, while others use left to right layout. Taking this factor into consideration can help organizations convey teachings accurately to diverse employees.

4. Cultivate a Healthy Work Culture

   Employees are the strength of any successful organization. Investing in corporate training is a way to cultivate a healthy and strong corporate culture. Additionally, employee loyalty will increase when they see that the company has invested resources toward their professional development needs. The staff of such an organization will be willing to reciprocate the effort by increasing their performance.

Challenges in Corporate Training Localization

As a result of regional differences, there is no fixed approach to localization. Applying a localization strategy for corporate training on a global scale can be tricky and comes with some challenges.

However, recognizing these challenges can be a step towards tackling and overcoming them. Here are some challenges when localizing corporate training materials.

1. Logistics

   Localizing materials for corporate training can be quite daunting as these learning resources come in varying formats. Extracting text for translation and adjusting multimedia for the Learning Management System (LMS) takes time and effort. Partnering with an expert localization service provider like GPI can make the process smoother and more effective.

2. Language Variations

   Apart from language differences, there are also dialectal variations between individuals within the same geolocation. This can pose a serious challenge and disrupt efforts targeted at localization. Catering to a workforce with linguistic preferences and dialectal differences requires paying keen attention to the differences in vocabulary, spelling, abbreviations, and grammatical structure.

3. Errors and Mistakes

   Providing employees with educational materials that are not up to par reduces employee engagement. Using examples that are not culturally appropriate can be offensive. In order to enhance engagement and retention, materials must be free of spelling errors, grammatical blunders, and formatting mistakes. Paying attention to these details reduces distractions, offenses, and uncomfortable situations.

Six Best Practices for Effective Corporate Training Localization

1. Know Your Target Audience

   Before implementing a localization strategy, it is important to know who the efforts are targeted towards. It is also important to be cognizant of dialectal differences in a language. For instance, the Spanish spoken in Argentina, Spain, and Mexico are distinct.

   An effective way to learn about your target audience is to gather useful information about employees. This data may include geographical location, language, culture, and laws.

   Once this information is known, the next step is to categorize employees based on similar characteristics of language, culture, locale, and country. By focusing on these details, the process of creating region-specific learning content will be easier.

2. Use Simple Language and Clear Formatting

   Different countries and regions have their unique formatting styles. Some cultures read from right to left. These observations are necessary to take note that all the elements in learning materials are culturally relevant for employees. Ensure that the fonts, text size, and layout are appropriate.

   Additionally, the language of the educational materials should be simple. Avoid ambiguous words that make sentences complex. Use short sentences to convey messages. This makes content translation and adaptation less difficult. Secondly, it enhances clarity, readability, engagement, and retention.

3. Add Relevant Graphics and Multimedia Contents

   There are two major ways of adding multimedia graphic elements to training materials, incorporating neutral graphics that will be relevant across regions and cultures, and adding personalized images or diagrams that will resonate with employees.

   For voice-overs, choosing the right narrator for training materials is key. For instance, training materials targeted towards employees in the West require a friendly and informal narrator whereas, an audience in the Asian region would prefer a formal narrator that sounds authoritative.

4. Leverage AI and Machine Translation Tools

   The presence of Artificial Intelligence in the translation industry has been really helpful in streamlining localization workflows. AI technologies and translation tools can be utilized to generate translation of multilingual content for large projects from written to multimedia content.

5. Partner with Localization Experts and Native Influencers

   Creating a well-adapted training program is beneficial. This is achievable with a trusted and experienced localization service provider such as GPI made up of expert translators who understand the subject matter. Collaborating with native influencers is also helpful to connect with the target audience, they can provide valuable insights and tips for effective localization because they understand the ins and outs of their language and culture. From the perspective of local influencers, training materials that contain nuanced language with idioms, phrases, and multimedia can be localized to be culturally relevant.

6. Conduct Quality Assurance Testing

   Once educational materials are translated and localized for the target workforce, the final step before publishing is quality assurance (QA) testing. This critical step is best handled by QA experts who are native speakers of the target language or by selected representatives fluent in that language, as decided by the localization team.

   After translating and localizing the educational materials for the target workforce, the final step before publishing the content is quality assurance (QA) testing. This is an integral step that can only be conducted by localization QA experts who are native speakers of the target language or a group of representatives of the target language, depending on the choice made by the localization team.

   QA testing is so important because the final version of the learning material is reviewed in context. The reviewer also checks for any technical issues related to the software and general user interface.

Conclusion

For modern businesses, having a workforce from various linguistic and cultural backgrounds is now the norm. This is especially the case for organizations that prefer to work with a diverse pool of talents.

Investing in an effective localization strategy increases the employee’s ability to comprehend and retain information. This improves work performance and productivity and eventually boosts company ROI.