In episode 75 of The Content Strategy Experts podcast, Elizabeth Patterson and Bill Swallow talk about how content reuse can help you save on your localization costs.
“The savings you get from a reduced word count is all fine and good, but the translation is only as good as the quality of the translation itself.”
—Bill Swallow

Related links: 

* Reuse in DITA and beyond (podcast)
* Use cases for content reuse 

Twitter handles:

* @PattersonScript
* @billswallow

Transcript:
Elizabeth Patterson:     Welcome to The Content Strategy Experts podcast brought to you by Scriptorium. Since 1997, Scriptorium has helped companies manage, structure, organize, and distribute content in an efficient way. In this episode, we talk about how content reuse can help you save on your localization costs. Hi, I’m Elizabeth Patterson.
Bill Swallow:     And I’m Bill Swallow.
EP:     And we’re going to dive in to talking about how content reuse can help you save on your localization costs. So I want to get started with just a really general question, and when we talk about reuse, what are we talking about?
BS:     That’s a very good place to start. When we talk about reuse, what we’re not talking about is copying and pasting of content. You could think of that in terms of reuse, but it’s not really what we’re talking about here. When you copy and paste content, you’re essentially duplicating it and then need to manage it in multiple places. What we’re talking about is more intelligent reuse of content, so writing it once and using it by reference wherever you need to use it. So this way it’s only written once, and it’s used multiple times as needed.
EP:     Great. And we have done a podcast and an additional blog post just solely on reuse, so I will link those in the show notes. But I want to dive into now looking more specifically at how content reuse, now that we’ve defined that, can help us save on localization costs.
BS:     Well, generally speaking, reuse reduces the overall number of unique words that you are translating. By using intelligent reuse in your writing once, and using it multiple times by reference, you have the opportunity to choose pieces of content that you will author once and only once, and that content gets translated once and only once regardless of how many times it’s being used. If you copy paste, you can still see a savings if the wording that you’re using is one for one, so if it’s absolutely exact all the time.
BS:     For example, I know Microsoft Word has an auto text feature, so you can throw a basic reusable component like a caution statement or some other boilerplate text, and you can use that to insert it every single time. That may save you a bit of time on the offering side and ensure that the text that you’re inserting is exact every single time. The only problem with that is that it is inserted as normal text every single time you insert it, so it does still increase the total amount of words that you need to send to the translator. It might be a 100% match, but they still have to do a check against it to make sure everything is fine. And the systems that they use will still count those words and say, “Yes, this is a 100% percent match.” But it’s still being counted as part of your incurred cost, because there’s something that’s going to the translator for them to see, even though there’s a match.
BS:     And in some cases you may even get what they call an ICE match,