Localisation: Priming your website for a global market


The world is speeding around us at an ever increasingly pace. As such, an important requisite for success today is for businesses of all sizes to be able to adjust to the blinding speed of change.  If you’re planning on widening your company’s horizons and expanding your web presence into foreign markets, it’s essential to present a properly localised website to the world.

But what does localisation mean and how is it achieved? 

Localising a website is priming its linguistic content, format and culture-specific nuances to be published in a specific country or region. 

There are many factors to consider when localizing a website but it’s easy to become too complacent and think that whatever works for a target audience will also work in another country. It’s essential that before you embark on the major task of displaying your products and/or services with an international audience, you do your research and rebuild the different features of your site accordingly to adapt to national variations in business practices and standards. 

The following steps will help you achieve a consistent, linguistic and culturally sound website suitable for international audiences: 

1. Build a master site, preferably in English, to facilitate the localisation process for your country managers.

Remember that building a master site and later localisations usually takes longer than working on creating a simple stand-alone site. You need to be able to commit at least 6-9 months worth of work to complete this key task and make sure your developers understand how to create multilingual sites. Also, involve your specific country staff in the creation of the master to consult with them and understand their needs when creating the master site.  

2. Design a flexible master site suited for localisation. Your graphic designer needs to be aware of the variations that different languages will bring to certain aspects of the site. For instance, not all languages are read from left to right, so the positioning of side navigation and sidebar content will have an impact on usability for visitors from different parts of the world. Also, when styling your text, your designer needs to consider that different language scripts will require different line heights and widths, so your designer should build-in some flexibility for the size of text areas, because the same paragraph may require more space when translated into another language. 

Use CSS Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) to keep the content of your website separate from the design and layout as well as UTF-8 character encoding which is compatible with over 90 languages. 
And remember that you need to negotiate usage rights with your design agency and photographer so that they give you global usage rights to designs, graphics and photos. 

3. Translate your website’s content. Start by translating the content into the right language for your target audience. If you are budget conscious, Google Translate is an option but one which does not necessarily produce a satisfactory outcome. 

The best way to achieve a completely accurate translation is to use a professional translator, someone who can help you with other important elements in play in a text, like slang, abbreviations and cultural nuances. If you decide to choose a professional translator, ask for credentials and don’t make your decision based on price – ask for credentials and even examples of work. You may want to get several samples from different translators and choose the best one. 

A simpler way, is to go through a translating agency and let them do all the work. They will find the appropriate translator for your project and will, in most cases, translate your website codes directly, saving you from having to reintegrate translated content. 

4. Localising content. Now that your content is translated to the target language/s, the next step is to localise it to suit the specific cultural nuances of the country where the site will be published. Accounting for cultural diversity in a business website provides a detailed outline of the various factors you need to consider when localising your site which are, in  a nutshell: 
  • Offensive cultural content: Although in some Western countries it may be acceptable to show images of women in swimming suits or people enjoying an alcoholic drink, other countries will find these images to be inappropriate.
  • Colour localisation: Colours may also have different significance to visitors from different cultural backgrounds as these have different meanings and associations in different parts of the world. 
  • Numerical data: Weights and measures, dates, currency and time are often represented differently.  
  • Specific legal regulations: You need to be aware of and compliant with the different privacy and antispam laws established by each country. For instance, in the EU each government has enacted its own opt-in or even double opt-in regulations to protect shoppers from unwanted emails. 
  • Pricing: Make sure your prices reflect local currency and taxes corresponding to each country. European shoppers expect taxes to be included, for example, while US shoppers do not. Prices must also take into account country-specific and/or contract pricing and exchange rates. 
  • Preferred payment methods: Online payment methods must be localised from site-to-site, for instance, you need to offer consumers in Japan the option to pay with Kombini, a cash on delivery system used in the country, while German shoppers need the option to pay by ELV (a form of direct debit unique to the country).
  • Customer support: If you are an Ecommerce site you need to provide localised customer support for each country. Your online and offline support personnel must speak the right language and have to be available at the right hours for the time zone and  be reached by local or low-cost phone numbers and email communications. 

5. Keywords and SEO. Keywords are likely to vary across different countries so you need to consider carefully which keywords make more SEO sense in every specific location. Prepare a list of your keywords and search terms in English and discuss these with your local marketer and your translator. A good translator can integrate your keywords into the copy as part of the translation process.

6. Get a native speaker to review the site.  Errors can occur regardless of how much care has been invested in the process of localisation. So, a final review by a native speaker is recommended to pick on human errors or more subtle cultural blunders that may not have been picked up when the translator was simply working in Microsoft word.



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