Website Translation and Localization
How can you attract consumers from other countries to your product? Create a website they can understand. To do this, you will have to localize your online resources. Let’s talk about how this process is different from ordinary translation, which factors you need to focus on, and the advantages Logrus IT offers when it comes to localization services.
Website localization is founded on several principles.
We translate the website with an eye to the sociocultural features of the target audience.
Even seemingly simple, familiar things can be written in different ways in various parts of the world. For example, in some countries dates are written starting with the day, but in others they write the month first, and in a few countries they actually start with the year. Confusion about dates can baffle your users and lead to misunderstandings. Imagine a customer orders a product to be delivered on June 7th, 2021, but you end up sending it to them a month later, on July 6th. But even if you manage to avoid misunderstandings like these, just having the date listed in an unfamiliar order (or even with unfamiliar characters between the numbers — June 6th could be written as 6/7, 06–07, 6.07, etc.) can annoy users and give them a bad impression of your brand.
If you list a temperature as «68°F» on your website, people in Maine or Utah will know exactly how to dress. Or they’ll understand that your product doesn’t need to be refrigerated, but shouldn’t be kept near a heat source. But people in countries where they use Celsius (most of the rest of the world) will have to spend time and energy converting this measurement — or they might just go to a competitor. The same goes for units of distance, weight, and much more.
If you don’t adapt the currency and payment methods used on your website, you won’t be able to process payments properly. If you don’t localize address fields (for example, by requiring customers to enter a state or province for countries where no such places exist), you can cause lots of problems for yourself, as well as headaches for your customers, and that won’t do your company’s reputation any favors.
If your website processes data from residents of the EU (if, for example, your online store delivers to Italy or Switzerland and requests customers’ addresses), you are obligated to display special notifications to your users. Localization specialists can warn you about things like this.
In the most challenging cases, we can redo pictures of photos and adapt them to the cultural features of the target country. This is most important when localizing websites for China and Middle Eastern countries.
A page of text can vary in length when translated into different languages, and the same goes for Web pages. Text on buttons and banners can be longer or shorter in different languages. If you ignore this, parts of your interface can end up overlapping one another. It can also throw off a page’s entire visual design.
Translation and localization often get confused or used as synonyms. They’re actually two completely different things. Translation is just one stage of the more complex and comprehensive process of localization, which entails adapting all relevant content to the norms of the target culture.
When localizing a website, the primary goal is to make it seem to a potential customer like the website was originally created in their native language. This will make the customer more likely to trust the site and remain loyal to it. You can read more about website localization in our article.
