Clarins Global Retail Training team improved digital learning content with Smartcat Language AI platform

Clarins, the leading skincare and cosmetics company, places strong emphasis on its frontliners’ training and development to ensure they’re well-equipped with the knowledge and skills needed to excel in their roles. The Global Retail Training team at Clarins plays a pivotal role in this mission, overseeing the creation and localization of learning materials for employees, salespeople, distributors, and partners worldwide.

The Clarins Global Training team, headquartered in Paris, France, comprises 20 dedicated learning professionals, including five experts focused on digital learning. Clarins also has a network of learning staff stationed in global markets, responsible for reviewing translations to ensure quality and consistency. The team’s main responsibility is to create, localize, and distribute learning and development content:

• Information about new and existing products

• Brand story documentation and training materials

• Customer experience trainings

• Management guidelines for Store and Counter Managers

To cater to the diverse needs of the company’s global employees, the team requires localization of a range of content types:

• PowerPoint presentation document translation

• XLIFF files to translate Articulate courses

• Course content for their mobile learning platform, Teach on Mars

• Video subtitles

The Clarins Global Training team realized that they needed a dedicated tool to improve management of their content translation and localization.

Time-consuming translation editing

They wanted to achieve a more streamlined translation process and reduce time-consuming translation work for local employees who took on this task above and beyond their normal duties. 

Decentralization, issues with company-wide consistency, and siloed processes

They also wanted a more effective way to centralize their content management in all languages and store their content in a private central repository to improve the product naming and description consistency used across global teams.

Numerous file types to translate for many different use cases

Clarins also needed a translation tool that could support all their required file formats, easily AI translate those files in a few steps, and store the translations in one place.

Clarins started using Smartcat in April 2023 and added their training staff to a common, collaborative workspace on the platform. There, they were able to fully centralize AI translation project management and benefit from the wide range of features provided. Some of these are described below.

Adaptive AI translation learns from the Clarins brand voice and terminology as well as every update made by every member of their team. This means they shouldn’t have to make the same edits more than once.

The team was able to take advantage of collaborative workflows within a common workspace and translation editor as a means to work on the content in sync and get live updates on progress. Smartcat is built for simplicity so that anyone can use it, even if they’re not a localization professional.

By centralizing all translations within the Smartcat platform, Clarins created a single repository of global learning content in all languages. This centralization makes it easier for experts in local markets to review content for accuracy, while also ensuring consistency across languages.

• AI linguistic assets including translation memories and glossaries

• a central repository for multilingual content

Clarins set up an AI-based translation workflow that has now been working for their global team:

1. The team uploads learning content files onto the Smartcat platform or the custom API integration continuously pulls them in.
   
   

2. They use Smartcat AI to translate the content in seconds. The AI utilizes the company’s translation memories, glossaries, and existing content to ensure high-quality translations that align with its brand voice, style, and terminology.
   
   

3. Learning teams in local markets review and approve translations within the user-friendly Smartcat Editor, making necessary edits.

4. Local teams can download the translated content in the required file format to be used in their training.

To efficiently manage translation and localization efforts, Clarins also implemented a custom integration with the Smartcat API, which allows them to seamlessly transfer product content from the Clarins internal product library into the Smartcat platform for translation. Once translated, the content is synchronized back into the product library. 

This product library serves as a critical resource by ensuring that all global salespeople have access to up-to-date product information in their local language. This enables them to effectively communicate with customers.

Clarins trusts the Smartcat platform to AI translate its learning content into a total of 12 languages, encompassing both European and Asian languages. The integration with Smartcat simplifies and automates the translation process, making it more efficient for Clarins to achieve its global training and development objectives. 

The product library includes translations in even more languages in addition to the 12 mentioned above.

Smartcat streamlines the translation of training documents for local Clarins employees worldwide. Smartcat AI allows them to get translations in seconds and review these for accuracy in Smartcat Editor.

Smartcat AI, which includes translation memory, learns from existing content and edits made by local experts via adaptive learning loops. As a result, AI translation accuracy increases over time and Clarins can maintain content consistency across all languages and channels.

The Smartcat platform simplifies project management for Clarins, particularly in terms of coordinating information sharing among global teams. The streamlined AI workflow allows for more efficient collaboration and reduces the risk of miscommunication.

The partnership between Clarins and Smartcat not only simplifies training content translation and localization but also yields substantial benefits in terms of quality, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness. By harnessing the power of Smartcat's platform and AI capabilities, Clarins successfully addresses the challenges of managing global learning and development materials. This helps them ensure that their global workforce is equipped with the knowledge and resources needed for success.