Entering a foreign market should be a very cautious and well-planned exercise. If a company or brand doesn’t demonstrate consideration for a nation’s unique demands and ways of being, it is doomed to failure. Even giants like Amazon get trapped in scandalous “lost in translation” stories when trying to enter foreign markets. What about small and medium businesses that have limited resources and expertise?
Why Localization Is More Than Just Translation
Anyone who spent many years in a foreign country and observed its people knows that each community differs significantly. They are different in the way it thinks and perceives the world because of its established temperament, social norms, different representations of good, evil, modesty, integrity, success, a different set of collective memories, and current circumstances that contribute to its unique mentality. Many of these aspects diffuse into this community’s language through idioms, figures of style, associations.
To be able to recognize negative associations that might accidentally arise during translation, it is not enough to just know “a lot” about a given nation – it is necessary to have very comprehensive and uniform cultural knowledge, without any obvious gaps, a kind of knowledge that usually forms during decades. Thus, if anglophones wanted to adapt online content to the languages of Japan, they would need to recruit native English-speaking Japanese translators who emerged from these communities. This is obviously a narrow circle of specialists.
https://www.elegantthemes.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/wordpress-translation.png
Some Suggestions to Aid with Localization and Translation
Doing a proper localization job might require an entire team of experts, including front-end developers, marketing and SEO specialists, copywriters. Yet, the lion’s share of the work is typically done by sites offering online translation services since these started assuming many other roles, offering integrated services to their clients. Website localization is already an indispensable service offered by many translation agencies. So, our most important tip is the following: delegate your translation/ localization task to such a service since they have you covered in multiple dimensions simultaneously.
Here are other localization tips related to the process itself:
- Adjust the content to match the consumption habits and tastes of the target audience. Your content should answer the needs and be in line with the values, perceptions, habits, lifestyle of local clients.
- Modify the text layout. Certain languages are wordier than others and one has to ensure that the text fills the space perfectly – it is one of the visual cues that creates the first impression.
- Adjust the currencies, the formats for time, date, addresses, phone numbers.
- Adapt the graphical design to local tastes. This research analyzed more than 80000 website designs across 44 countries and concluded that the looks of local websites differ greatly across such parameters as the number of text areas, visual complexity, colorfulness, the average color saturation.
- Work with SEO specialists to make your web pages rank higher in local searches. Create locally relevant content, choose proper keywords and adjust their density, increase the number of backlinks to your platform, eliminate wordiness, ensure high levels of content uniqueness.
- Make your website integrate well with local websites: social media, local maps, business and service review platforms.
- Avoid machine translation – it is cheaper, but human professionals translate incomparably better.
It’s Time to Start
We hope we convinced you that translation and localization are jobs that should be treated seriously. We haven’t done this to scare you but to help you avoid obvious and subtle mistakes and give you an objective impression about the complexity of the task and the importance of picking the right type of help in the process.
Bio
Michael wrote tons of essays as a copywriter for several companies. He performed on-demand research primarily in marketing but also in finances, business, education. His articles are typically aimed at colleagues who recently joined these industries.
Localization and Translation Tips
More from NEWS
After BVLGARI, TAG Heuer CEO also exits, too! (LVMH Watches)
Following the departure of BVLGARI CEO Jean Christoph Babin (as of June 2026), TAG-Heuer CEO Antoine Pin is also exiting …
Soho House – MCR Hotels financing deal uncertain!
Soho House has secured the financing required to keep its $2.6b take-private deal on track after major investor MCR Hotels …
Bankrupt SAKS Global owes LVMH, Kering & Chanel over $220 million
SAKS Global Enterprises’ delayed payments to luxury brands played a key role in accelerating the retailer’s decline and pushing it …
