You’ve built a great product or solution, have solid traction on your home turf and are getting more frequent inquiries from other countries. Time to go global, right?
Globalization has its set of challenges – differences in culture, currency, tax implications and more. Cultural difference can be huge – everything from nuances of language to how much informal chit-chat you should engage in before digging into business. Further complicating this is that doing business in some regions – like the European Union – requires adherence to a very different set of privacy laws.
But what I want to focus in on here is your 24/7 business presence where your first impression is likely to happen no matter where you and your prospects are located on the globe: Your website.
Even if you’re just dipping your toe in the global marketplace, your website will, ideally, be attracting decision makers researching your product or service. You’ll also be facing locally-based competition. You can’t assume any of these potential website visitors are English speakers. That’s why globalization and localization strategies are essential.
Wait. What? What’s the difference?
Globalization is when a company is serving several regions around the world.
Website Localization is creating content – text, video, imagery, infographics and more – relevant for local cultures/markets.
Well, with regard to globalization, there’s more to serving your global market than simply translating your website copy. You have to take a deeper look to localize your content, which means taking a wider view of your site. From colors, fonts, date and phone number formats, weights and measures and idiomatic expressions – these all need to be considered as part of the website localization strategy.
Think UK English “colour” versus US English “color.”
Another example is Mercedes’ “BlueTEC” line of vehicles in Germany, which tout environmental friendliness. “BlueTEC” would be lost on an American audience, which has been trained to think “green” when it comes to the environmental movement.
This goes beyond language, too, to a general business philosophy based on where you’re located.
Many European and Asian business cultures lead with features of a product, whereas the American market wants to know about the benefits of that product and the emotional connection that can be made to it.
Translating your website as part of your globalization and localization strategy is about more than just offering multilingual content. While simply translating your website into 82 different languages like Neil Patel might give you SEO juice and a small linguistic assist to your international visitors, it won’t give your audience very much context and it certainly won’t give them an exceptional customer experience.
You also need to decide what will be translated; how often translations should take place; who will do the translating and how much of a cost you’re willing and able to handle.
First, let’s take a look at the “who” and “what” questions. Currently, there are three basic ways to translate:
So, now it’s time to start translating, right? Not so fast. Best practices dictate starting with the minimum viable content (MVC), which ensures the brand message and key terms are consistent across markets. A translation management services vendor often guides this process, but if you’re going to be driving your website localization in-house, here are the steps you should follow:
There is a lot to consider here and many of you will choose to a) do nothing or b) go the machine translation route. Ultimately, though, if you want to win big time in different countries, you don’t need to just walk the walk, you need to talk the talk. Literally.
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