Content Localization Simplified: Using Scout to Tailor Your Content

Content localization is the process of adapting content to fit the cultural, linguistic, and contextual nuances of a specific target market or region. This goes beyond mere translation of words from one language to another; it involves tailoring the content to resonate with the local audience in terms of their cultural references, social norms, and preferences.

This can include tailoring things such as:

• Modifying cultural references, imagery, colors, symbols, and themes to be culturally appropriate and relatable.
• Ensuring that the content complies with local laws and regulations, such as privacy policies, advertising standards, and industry-specific regulations.
• Adapting date formats, currency, units of measurement, and other locale-specific elements.

Content localization is crucial for businesses and organizations aiming to reach a global audience. It significantly increases engagement by making the content feel familiar and relevant, thereby capturing the audience’s attention and interest. Localized content also builds trust by showing respect and understanding of the local culture, which in turn builds credibility with the audience.

Lets now incorporate some of the above into a Scout app. To get started, follow these steps:

1. Create an App on Scout: If you don’t have a Scout account, you can create one for free at https://www.scoutos.com.
2. Set Up Your Organization and App: Once your organization and app are created, you will land on the App Builder dashboard.

For this demo, we’ll keep the app’s functionality simple and allow customization based on your specific use case.

For this example, let’s add a new input field to specify the country for which the content should be appropriate.

To add more input fields, Click on the “+” icon located at the top center of the page and select “Single Line Text” to create input field for entering the the target country. Lets name this new field “target_country.”

With two input fields — one for the text or information to be translated and the other for specifying the target country — we can now proceed to configure our LLM block.

Lets first select the LLM, GPT-4o is recommended. Next lower the temperature to 0, you may want to experiment with this use case on different temperature values, so feel free to adjust this value. Max tokens will depend on the length of text to be translated, a value of 400–500 should suffice for most marketing material. Lastly make sure the response type is set to “text.” For a refresher on LLM block parameters click here.

Last step on this block configuration is to make our prompt. This prompt will need to incorporate the two input fields of our app and a short {system_message} to tell the app what we would like it to do. Feel free to copy the prompt below or customize it to fit your use case:

$SYSTEM: As the Scout Localization Assistant.

{% set system_message %}
Localize the user input into the native language for the country noted in {{inputs.target_country}} considering cultural references, compliance, units of measurement and locale-specific elements, provide a translation of for the user input.

{% endset %}

{% if not chat_history %}
$SYSTEM: {{ system_message }}
{% endif %}
{% for message in chat_history %}
{% if message.role != "system" %}
{% if loop.last %}
$SYSTEM: {{ system_message }}

{% endif %}
${{message.role | upper}}: {{message.content}}
{% endif %}
{% endfor %}

$USER: {{inputs.input}}

With the prompt field configured its now time to test. To interact with this app you can enter the text to be translated in the first input field and the target country in the second input field.

After testing, review the localized output to ensure it meets your expectations. Refine the input fields and LLM prompt as needed to improve accuracy and relevance.

As always, If you have any questions or need further assistance drop into our community Slack where our users and staff can lend a hand.