Most businesses have potential to reach buyers within foreign markets, provided they get the professional localization assistance from local marketers. You will be able to gain a local reputation that could be just as big as or possibly bigger than your local market. It boils down to selection, feasibility, research and planned implementation. The importance of professional localization of your business, software, web site, etc., can not be expressed enough. Simple translation is no where near adequate if you desire a respectable image for your business or product.

Localization is the modification of a business, product, content, or such so that it satisfies both the language and cultural differences of the targeted market.

A product or service you provide that does not adhere to the definition above is not going to give your business a suitable reputation. This is why you must take the following important steps to ensure you are catering fully and properly for your target market.

1. Do Not Make False Assumptions

Many people make false assumptions with regard to localization that can lead to dire consequences. Here are a few;

“It’s only translation, it should be easy.”

Surprisingly, many companies without localization knowledge will assume that their website can simply be translated into foreign languages. Unfortunately, website localization requires much more than just translating the text. Text is only a part of user experience; date/time, input/output, images, colours, layout, fonts, validation and functionality makes the experience complete. You can have an excellent translation, but if the site is not localized properly customer satisfaction will suffer.

“Our distributors in the respective countries will take care of the local websites.”

Leaving the responsibility of developing your website to your distributors is risky. It may result in an inconsistent brand image which will lead to customer confusion.

“Our Chinese employee can translate the website.”

Being able to write, doesn’t make a writer. Being a native speaker doesn’t make a translator. Professional translators have years of experience in translation and often obtain higher education in linguistics. Bilingual and in country employees are great resources for reviewing translated content and providing insider feedback to linguists, but shouldn’t be considered for providing content translations.

2. Don’t use machine translation

In recent years great progress has been made towards programmatically translating documents from language to language. That said, it is far from being an acceptable replacement for a fluent translator. The edge cases and “what ifs” on the technical/logical side of the translation are enough for me to say that, but when you start talking about potentially offensive translations this is a definite requirement. Just look at an example of an automated German to English translation. It’s readable but it’s far from polished – not something you want as a first impression to your site.

Machine translation tools such as Google Translate or Babylon may be useful for a personal blog, but not for a commercial website. Your website is the public image of your business; you want to make sure that its content is translated properly. Machine translation is far from being an acceptable replacement to human translation. Give machine translation a quick try and see it yourself:

The English sentence:

“The fastest way to find out how we can help you is to contact us for an evaluation of your needs and suggestions for next steps.”

Translated by Google Translate into Spanish as:

“La forma más rápida para averiguar cómo podemos ayudarle es contactar con nosotros para una evaluación de sus necesidades y sugerencias para los pasos siguientes. “

When you translate the sentence back to English with Google Translate it reads:

“The quickest way to find us out how we can help is how to contact us for an assessment of their needs and suggestions for next steps.”

Hope that clears the point.

3. Be culturally sensitive

If you’re not very familiar with your target culture ask for an opinion from someone who is (or hire a localizer who is). Seemingly innocent words, phrases, and images could be misunderstood by another culture. If you use terminology that is only understood in your region or culture, the best case you can hope for is that a visitor to your site just won’t understand and will ignore it, but it really reduces your credibility and the overall enjoyment of visiting your site.

4. Don’t use graphics as text

This is just a good idea in general, but it makes even more sense when localizing pages. Creating images is time consuming and has more potential for error. Using an appropriate encoding and employing CSS should get close to the same effect (with an extra point for accessibility). If you need to use an image, be prepared to accept localized strings and make the image yourself – localizers may not have the time, skills, or software they need to create the images.

5. Use The Correct Language on the Web

Right now, most of the pages on the Web are in English, but just because you’re writing your page in English in Australia, doesn’t mean that a Canadian would understand it or find it useful. Make sure that you avoid slang on your site, as that is the most non-translatable element of a page. When you list a price, indicate what currency you’re using. And when you list sizes or measurements, it helps if you list conversions, or link to a conversion Web site.

If you are going to translate your site, it works best if you hire a professional translator. While there are translation programs on the Web, many of them can result in very humorous results. If you can’t hire a translator, then consider not putting up the page in that language, your page will look more professional if the language it’s in is correct.

Avoid Generic terms such as:

• Foreign/domestic/local – what’s foreign to you may be local to your reader
• International – be careful here, you should use this term to define something that covers many or all nations, not just all but your own
• Regional designations – “east coast” means something completely different to someone in Moscow, Russia than to someone in Moscow, Idaho, US.
• Cities without indicating state and/or country – there is at least one London in the United States, as well as in England, and I live 20 minutes from Brisbane, but it’s not in Queensland, Australia.
• Slang and dialect – words that are not found in a good dictionary should be avoided, as they won’t be easily translatable.

6. Take Care When Using Special Characters and Computer Platforms

Most platforms will support displaying the special characters, but some of them are a bit more esoteric, and so not all machines will display them correctly. The characters that cause the most problems are Ÿ, ÿ, Ð, ð, ß, and þ. If you are translating into a language that uses these characters, make sure to test your pages on both Netscape and Internet Explorer, and on both Macintosh and Windows. This will help your readers to understand you better.

The above steps will ensure that you will have proper localization of your website in such a way that you will get the best of the market you target to. This will guarantee an increase of your profits in the rapidly globalizing internet.