The Gist
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Effective localization strategy. Localization is important to align your brand with cultural nuances and user-specific preferences to drive meaningful experiences.
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Balancing cost and quality. A successful localization strategy prioritizes high-traffic, essential content and adapts to user needs.
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User control matters. While localization enhances the user experience, always give users control over language, currency and region settings to create a personalized, engaging journey.
Have you ever wrestled with a clunky, poorly translated instruction manual for your new shiny gadget? It can be very frustrating. Now, take that frustration online, where it gets amplified and where user patience is thinner than a wafer. Would you trust a brand that doesn’t seem to understand you? Real personalization starts with language.
We often get bogged down by the complexities of the web, omnichannel strategies and personalization, and we can forget that the most fundamental element in any human interaction is language. Sure, fine-grained translations can be pricey, but it’s more costly to lower conversion rates and brand engagement, which is the result of deficient translations.
Customers don’t care that the site might be available in 23 languages and serve 72 different markets. They care about their language, their experience and their interaction with the brand right here, right now. Localization strategy matters to create the best experience.
Whether it’s a simple branding page, a mobile app, a social media campaign or a chatbot conversation, language forms the foundation of a personalized customer experience.
Let’s get it right. And, like all aspects of digital transformation, this starts with a solid strategy.
Table of Contents
Localization Goes Beyond Translation
Localizing an experience goes beyond translating it. It also requires making your brand feel local and resonating with the user’s cultural and linguistic nuances. Consider a Guatemalan user landing on a Colombian Spanish interface. They may feel just as alienated as a user from London reading an American English site or a French Canadian being forced to use the English version of the site. This mismatch is the first clue that the experience was not truly designed for them. By understanding and catering to these user-specific preferences and situations, you can create a more empathetic and user-centric experience.
Beyond swapping words, localization encompasses a wide range of variables, including dialects, currency, date and time formats, measurements, imagery and even local payment methods. Even perfectly translated words can fall flat if the references or idioms are off. In extreme cases, this can be very costly for your brand. Also, most individuals have user-specific preferences and situations. Imagine an expat visiting your site from a foreign country.
You need to account for cultural imagery, which can vary greatly across different locations. Consider regional preferences and offer content and products tailored to regional tastes, holidays or events.
Related Article: 6 Ways Generative AI Is Changing Content Management
How to Develop an Effective Localization Strategy
A strong localization strategy should be supported by a user experience and technology architecture that provides the tools to prioritize effectively. Define your ideal experience and then specify a content, technical and experience architecture that allows and facilitates such a personalized experience. (Yes, localization is an aspect of a sound personalization schema.)
By understanding the current user experience, the organization can start triaging its localization efforts. Which content is crucial to translate first? Should they use human translation or machine-led translation with human review? Will they need full transcreation (adapting the content culturally), or will plain translation be enough? What are the SEO implications and considerations?
Even inside the same organization, the considerations for every market and language might be different. For example, it might make sense for your organization to have a fully transcreated French translation for your Canadian market but keep the U.S. English for the same market. At the same time, you might have just a few French clients for whom your Canadian French will suffice. The number of permutations of country-region-language can be large, so you have to be cautious in deciding which level of localization you plan to achieve. Quite often, your wishlist will be larger than your budget, and it’s better to be deliberate about your decision-making than to end up with partially translated experiences.
You also need to understand how you’re going to recreate these experiences. Are you going to translate locally using local teams? Are you going to use an agency and a service? Or a mix? If so, how are you going to make sure you keep your brand consistent in all markets?
All of those are complicated questions to answer, but it’s way better for you to address them beforehand than deal with the pains of neglecting them down the road.
Technology Solutions to Enhance Your Localization Strategy
Once you’ve outlined your overall content strategy, you can integrate it into a technology approach that can execute that strategy effectively. At this time, new elements come into play, and the complexity of a sound localization strategy becomes evident. Different content management platforms offer different localization approaches and customization levels, and each offering affects the way you put personalization in place. Here, you will also be interacting with data and SEO aspects that tend to be critical for local markets, but they’re not that important for the central decision-making entity. For example, some businesses make strategy decisions based on the location of headquarters. If that’s in the U.S. and they don’t take into account European-specific needs, it may create friction from day one for those users whose needs weren’t heard.
Tiny details will become significant issues if not appropriately addressed. For example, not considering how titles will be displayed in other languages can be costly. Short content blocks may not be able to hold long German words, and you don’t want to forget that in Arabic, your titles will go from right to left. These mistakes will be harder to fix later.
Discovering encoding or charset issues in your stack just days before launch can be a nightmare is enough to make many product owners cry. Same goes for having pages that are correctly translated but finding out that translating URLs will be more complicated than expected. Same goes for not considering hreflang tags. All this (i.e., caching considerations, dynamic content rendering mechanisms and structured data markup) can add up fast.
Balancing Cost, Quality and User Control
Once you have all the elements on the table, you can start making the calls. Localization can get expensive fast, so you have to come up with balancing decisions that will keep costs down without sacrificing the quality of the experience.
Start by prioritizing key content. Your analytics should be able to guide you. Not everything needs to be translated, and not everything needs to be done at the same time. There will always be trade-offs, and your content and strategy architects will help you come up with the right approach. Focus on high-traffic pages, top-of-funnel marketing content and compliance pages that are not optional. Then, start refining.
As you don’t need to translate everything, you also don’t have to use the same localization strategy for every piece of your content. In some areas, you will need local translators. Still, on less relevant pages, you might have fully automated translations that your users won’t mind (think forums or comments from other languages, which users will understand if the translations fall short).
A word of caution: Even with your best efforts to provide a localized experience, users should always remain in control. Although your visitors may appreciate their targeted content, many will still want to set their own preferences. Let them change their settings easily. You can achieve this by giving users explicit choices (like Amazon and Netflix, which let you choose language, currency and locale settings, overriding the default ones).
It’s important to let people choose their preferences from the first interaction, and make it easy to change settings. At the same time, you need to have a smart set of fallbacks that feel natural to your users. You can even run A/B testing to find out what works best for your specific site and market.
How to Optimize Localization for Maximum Impact
Finding the sweet spot between cost and quality is an ongoing challenge. It’s a delicate balancing act. Invest too little, and you’ll provide subpar experience. Invest too much, and you might be taking away the budget from more productive endeavors. It may turn out that localizing doesn’t deliver a return. Because of this, strive to have a few hard metrics to measure your efforts again. Is this market big enough for you to invest heavily in localization? Will it be? Has your businessit not grown because of the poor local experience?
Depending on the reach and size of your content, you will need to rely on local experts to understand unique cultural aspects that aren’t obvious to you. Be mindful that no one can judge local content better than a local. Don’t fall under the temptation that most of this can be centralized. And, as with all customer personalization efforts, you must have clarity in the metrics that will be telling you how and when to pivot.
Ultimately, the aim here is to produce a personalized experience that resonates with each individual user, no matter where they are or what language they speak. It’s important to make them feel understood, valued and connected to your brand.
Core Questions Around Localization
Editor’s note: Here are two important questions to ask about localization strategies:
What’s the difference between translation and localization?
Localization goes beyond translation. It involves adapting content to resonate with local cultures, dialects, payment methods and regional preferences. For example, translating a website into French for Canada might require a different approach than for France, once you take into account local idioms, currency and cultural nuances.
How can I build a successful localization strategy for my business?
Start by understanding the user experience, then prioritize content that must be translated first. Develop a clear content, technical and experience architecture, and consider the specific needs of each market. Be mindful of cost versus quality, and allow users to control language and locale preferences to maintain a personalized experience.
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