How to localize Google Docs quickly and easily

Google Docs is the go-to tool for a massive number of businesses worldwide. The ease of use, collaboration, and sharing make it perfect for remote teams. When your enterprise decides to go global and needs to translate its Google Docs content, you may think the simplest option is to do the translations inside Google Docs using Google Translate.

The reality is that Google Docs wasn't designed to enable its users to manage multilingual content. So, translating this way will lead to frustration and caos. After running Google machine translation, you'll need a translation vendor to review the translation. You'll probably then have to manually download the docs, send them off for translation, get the translations back, upload them somewhere, etc. Alternatively, you can have the translator add versions in their language to the same document, which ultimately gets bloated and hard to follow.

And there's another crucial problem: What will you do if the document gets updated afterwards? That happens all the time during active collaboration and WIP project delivery.

In this article, we’ll show you how Smartcat can help you overcome these challenges through a continuous AI-Human localization workflow, and how you can apply that workflow to your Google Docs.

Behold our Google Drive folder where we store all the source documents in English:

The Google docs themselves are stored in the subfolders. For example, here’s a snippet of the “guides” folder, used for storing various guides, whitepapers, and so on. (To be clear, the folder directory structure is entirely up to you, it should be whatever suits your needs best.)

Each folder contains both the source and translated variations of a document, identified by language-based suffixes:

• (src) = the source (e.g. English) document, authored by copywriters

• (ru), or any other language code = the translated variation, automatically uploaded by our localization automation tool

• (keys) = a special rendering of the document that enables in-context preview for linguists (more on this later)

Inside every document, you would see a normal Google doc, with one difference: there’s a special line in the very beginning that “tells” our plugin the languages this document should be translated to:

Every hour, our synchronization plugin sends all source texts from all files across all subfolders in the shared folder to a pre-configured Smartcat project:

The real beauty of it is the synchronization. Say you’ve got a translated Google doc sitting around, and you or the copywriter made a couple of edits here and there. The document is then updated in Smartcat, and translators working on it get updates to the translation file.

Basically, copywriters can continue to work on the document while linguists are translating it. So even if there was a change in any document already sent to linguists to work with, they will be able to continue their work without any problem. (The file is updated at the beginning of every next hour, e.g 17:00, 18:00, etc. so as to not make the changes too frequent to be comfortable to work with.)

But here’s our favorite part: When linguists are working on the translation, they can reference each specific segment of the text in the source document by using the In-context preview panel.

Once the document is translated, the plugin puts it back into your Google Drive during the next synchronization.

One important thing to avoid is adding any changes to the target Google doc itself, as the changes will be discarded during the next sync. There are two ways the sync can be done:

• The best way is to make the changes in the Smartcat document. This will make sure all your translation memories stay up-to-date with relevant translations.

• The easiest way isi to create a copy of the target Google doc, move it to another folder for convenience, and continue your work there.

With the Smartcat Google Docs Translator plug-in, you'll find it quick and easy to connect your Google Drive to Smartcat and start translating. Here are the steps you need to follow:

1. Get your 14-day free trial of Smartcat and log in to your account.

2. In your dashboard, click to set up an integration.

3. Connect SmartCat with Google Docs and choose your preferences, like target languages and glossaries.

4. Click to AI translate the content of your document.

5. Review the translation in-house or find a reviewer in our marketplace.

6. When your translation is ready, you can download it from Smartcat or view it directly in your Google Drive.

Below are some best practices to help you get top quality translations at the lowest cost in your document localization process.

If you randomly start translating in Google Docs then the translations will soon get out of control. For enterprises dealing with large quantities of content in various languages, a language management platform is essential to keep everything organized.

Google Translate is a generic machine translation tool and the output it produces isn’t adapted to your business preferences. This means extensive review will be needed. Smartcat uses its proprietary AI translation software to translate your content. By learning from your existing translations, its AI can achieve 95%+ quality.

Just as we’ve explained in this article, the fastest way to get Google Doc translations is to use a plug-in to connect your Google Docs to your translation management platform. This helps you avoid wasting time uploading and downloading files.

Use consistent styles, headings, and labels, which simplify translation. Add comments to give context on complex or idiomatic phrases.

A computer-assisted translation (CAT) tool is a dedicated tool for producing translations. It makes it easy for reviewers to leverage past translations held in your translation memories and to refer to your glossaries. Smartcat Editor is a leading CAT tool built into the Smartcat language platform.