Localization Service

When presenting video content in multiple countries or regions, one might immediately think of adding subtitles and/or audio dubbing (sometimes referred to as ‘subs and dubs’). While localizing the content itself is important, what’s often undervalued are the benefits of localizing the metadata associated with your content. Metadata refers to the descriptive information about each piece of content, including titles, descriptions, tags, images, and other contextual information. Localizing metadata for a streaming video service offers numerous benefits that enhance user experience, accessibility, and engagement on a global scale. Localizing your metadata involves more than just translation and entails adapting it to different languages, cultures, and regions.

Localization is often written in shorthand as L10n (the ‘10’ being used in lieu of the ten letters between l and n). Here are the key benefits of localizing metadata for your streaming video service:

In summary, localizing the metadata for your streaming video service is a strategic move that benefits both you and your users. It enhances user engagement and discoverability, ultimately contributing to your platform’s growth and success in a global market.

Axinom Mosaic is an extremely flexible and versatile framework for video content management, with an open-source Media Service that allows you to define a data model around your business, as opposed to forcing you to adapt your business to some predefined schema. Axinom’s Localization Service is one of many managed services which are part of Axinom Mosaic’s suite of services.

Axinom’s Localization Service is a managed service to handle the translation and localization of entities from other services and does not depend on other services (besides core services). The Localization Service uses the concept of a ‘locale’ as opposed to a ‘language’ for your metadata, as ‘language’ alone might not allow for regional cultural differences. For example, the Portuguese language differs quite a bit between Brazil and Portugal, and folks from the UK might prefer this entire topic be referred to as localisation (also conveniently abbreviated as L10n). Although the Localization service is managed by Axinom, you have complete control to not only specify your default locale, but also to create and name your locales as you see fit. While we suggest using a standardized nomenclature, such as en-US or pt-BR, each of your locales also has a common name (such as American English, or Brazilian Portuguese) which you can set to whatever makes the most sense to your content management team.

Just as Axinom Mosaic’s Media Service allows you to define your own metadata schema, you can also determine which fields should be localizable. Some fields, such as ‘Original Title’ or an ID field probably should be presented consistently in all regions, while localizing fields such as Title, Synopsis, Genre, etc. will afford you the ability to tailor the presentation to your audience, either based on their geography or by user action within your UI. If you have distribution partners around the world, you can customize your data feeds to them to include the language(s) that are pertinent to their audiences.

The initial release of Axinom Mosaic’s Localization Service allows you to localize fields with textual representation. While this service is not intended to support the localization of assets (images/videos) and relations between entities, the metadata fields of those types can be translated - and the flexibility of Axinom Mosaic’s schema allows you to create a structure for your localized assets. An example might be creating image types of ‘Poster Image’ and ‘French Poster Image’ for a service based in the US which also serves a French-speaking audience in Canada. Videos support localization on the file level by providing different audio, subtitle, and closed caption streams (but only one video stream), which is separate from the localization of the metadata about the videos.

Some data that Axinom Mosaic’s Localization Service does support would best be localized directly in the end-user-facing service or the client application. Examples are deterministic unit conversions (e.g. from kilometers to miles) or very dynamic ones such as currency conversions based on the current exchange rate. Date and number formatting is left to the client application where the actual value does not change depending on the locale.

Over time, textual fields from all of Axinom Mosaic’s services (and well-integrated 3rd-party services) should be localizable. If there are any questions about the suitability of Axinom Mosaic’s Localization Service for your specific use case, please contact us and one of our experts would be happy to work with you.