The podcasting industry flourished alongside smartphones, driven by the request for on-demand content and the necessity of digital presence for businesses. As of 2022, there are more than 2 million podcasts worldwide, with the average person dedicating seven hours weekly to their favorite shows. Experts predict podcasting to be a £75.79 billion industry by 2028.
Amidst the vast content across numerous platforms, enhancing your accessibility greatly benefits your visibility and popularity among listeners. With hosts and listeners increasing across regions and around 1 million active podcasts in 100 languages, ensuring your podcast’s inclusivity is vital for staying competitive. Many businesses are now expanding their brand through podcast localization.
This post will talk about the role translation and localization play and why they’re so important in multilingual podcasts. However, before doing that, let’s talk a little more about podcast localization.
What Is Podcast Localization?
Podcast localization involves tailoring content to fit a particular country or region’s linguistic, cultural, and specific needs. It goes beyond mere text translation, encompassing considerations like culturally relevant references, appropriate numerical formats, and adjustments to images and graphics.
Localization is what drives the development of multilingual content marketing. This strategy entails crafting, translating, and disseminating podcast content in various languages to engage a broader global audience.
Multilingual podcasts can assist your brand in expanding its reach and forging connections with customers in different regions, each with unique language preferences and cultural contexts.
How Can Translation and Localization Help Your Podcast Grow?
Expanding your podcast’s influence on a global audience is pivotal in unlocking its full potential. Localizing your podcast presents an opportunity to transcend your current status. By enhancing accessibility, you pique greater interest, foster a loyal following, and improve the overall customer experience.
Moreover, embracing a diverse audience— irrespective of their location or language— positions you uniquely amidst the sea of competing voices. Enhanced accessibility correlates with amplified reach. Localizing your podcasts will catalyze substantial growth if your business aspirations encompass international expansion. Drawing in a wider array of listeners and cultivating a fan base across various regions can increase customer engagement from those locales.
Notably, this strategy bolsters your SEO efforts. Incorporating transcripts of your podcast in multiple languages empowers Google’s crawlers to index your web page, propelling you higher in search rankings and driving more traffic to your website.
Expanding into international markets is crucial for sustained business growth, and the swift pace of podcast creation and consumption presents an excellent opportunity to leverage this for heightened visibility. Whether you’re sharing new insights, discussing your offerings, or delving into a relevant topic in depth, numerous businesses stand to gain by taking their podcasts globally.
Steps to Creating Localized Multilingual Podcasts
While localizing your podcast might require an initial investment, it doesn’t necessarily have to be expensive. There are budget-friendly approaches to managing the process, and the returns are worthwhile over time. We’ve outlined the eight key steps to ensuring you maximize the benefits of your internationalization strategy.
Use Native-speaking Linguists.
A linguist who is a native speaker understands cultural nuances, which is something a machine cannot do (at least for the time being). This awareness helps prevent unintentional offenses and ensures relatability, avoiding the loss of valuable listeners and potential customers.
A native speaker can also capture the precise tone and employ the right phrases or idioms. By investing in professional translators and native podcast hosts, your podcast will maintain its original conversational tone, regardless of the language it’s localized into.
Get Transcribing
Create a written script for your podcast episode to streamline the process. This makes it much easier to translate a version into multiple languages for media localization. You have the option of doing this yourself or using expert transcription services. Our transcription translators make sure that your audio is appropriately adapted for new audiences after it has been accurately transcribed and properly evaluated by our editors and experts.
A transcript is essential for increased discoverability because search engines cannot understand audio files without them. Your podcast’s search engine ranks will rise quickly if you emphasize search engine optimization (SEO). Repurposing your excellent transcription as text content for your social media platforms will also help you to get the most out of it by providing accessibility in a different format.
Keep Cultural Differences in Mind
Even if a sizable portion of podcasts are produced and listened to in the US, focusing only on American culture will not help you reach a wider audience. Each episode needs to engage a local audience in order to maintain listener engagement.
This can entail making use of pop culture allusions like songs and TV shows, using well-known metaphors and jokes, or exploiting regional accents. For instance, consider creating various versions in Spanish and Mexican Spanish for different audiences. Gains from localization will come from attracting new customers and expanding the market.
Hire Professionals
Most likely, your writing prowess and fascinating hosting abilities flourish in your mother tongue, connecting with your local audience. However, while trying to translate and localize your podcasts, the language complexity and soul that give your content impact may vanish. By choosing competent translation and localization services, you may keep your intended message and the delivery’s tone and manner intact.
These services ensure contextual and grammatical correctness and represent phrases, idioms, and references to culture in an appropriate manner. A capable multilingual voice services provider can also provide competent native speakers as hosts for each target language. This opens the door for specialized podcast versions that are painstakingly created for various markets.
Conclusion
At Translation Source, we recognize that producing podcasts for a multilingual audience and managing associated expenses can be challenging for you. Therefore, our goal is to streamline the entire process.
Across the globe, podcast consumption has become a daily routine for millions, and with our assistance, your podcast content becomes accessible to them. Through our services, your multilingual podcasts will attract new listeners, drive revenue growth, and enhance brand visibility.
