How to Localize Your Content Cheap and Fast
A typical website will have different types of content such as branding, marketing, technical, legal, back-end and contact content. Notably, each one of these types of content needs to be localized in their unique way. As such, you will need to adopt different strategies when trying to localize the different types of content that you have.
Branding content will mostly inform the consumer about your business and products. It is somewhat the image and identity of your business. It simply tells the customers who you are and what you stand for.
Marketing content is more persuasive and less informative compared to branding content. Through marketing, you are trying to convince customers to buy your products and promote your brand.
Technical content refers to the vocabulary that is unique to your trade. Fashion vocabulary such as cotton fabric or computer hardware vocabulary such as USB are examples of technical content.
Legal content is all about policy. For instance, your business’ policy about customer privacy, whether your website uses cookies and your cookie policy as well as contract information between you and your customers is all legal information.
Back-end content refers to your system and will entail things such as programming, the databases that your website deals with, the system workflow and so on.
Contact content will tell the customers where they can find you physically (your address) and how to reach you (telephone information, e-mail address, social media handles or even fax).
Each content will be localized differently. For instance, when localizing legal content, you will have to take into account the legal provisions of the country, whereas when localizing marketing content, you will only focus on the culture of the country. Below are some of the ways of ensuring that you localize your content in a cheap and fast way.
Internationalize Your Brand
Localizing your brand simply means adapting your brand to the language and culture of the local people. You must always make sure that your brand name has taken into account the cultures of the local language. Moreover, you must also make sure that your brand name does not sound offensive or cannot be misinterpreted in some languages. In the event that your brand name sounds weird or has a very offensive meaning in some languages, as you localize your brand, you might consider changing the brand name only as far as that country or language is concerned.
There are so many examples of brand names that sound so awful when translated into some languages. For instance, the name Hulu while a very useful on-demand TV and movie service actually means ‘cease and desist’ in Swahili, an East African language. How will such people watch TV shows and movies if the name encourages them not to? Notably, it does not matter if you have to change your brand name several times. Toyota uses different names of the same product across different markets all the time. For example, one of their sedan brands has the following names:
- Toyota Beruta in Japan;
- Toyota Yaris in North America;
- Toyota Belta in Africa;
- Toyota Vios in Asia.
H2: Localize Your Marketing
Marketing is all about drawing customers to your brand. Customers will feel drawn to products that represent them and speak directly to the target audience. It is not only about language but also about culture. As such, before localizing your content, you will need to do a lot of research about the culture of the people, what they believe in, what they prefer, what they dislike and so on. Afterwards, it will be easy to transform this information into a powerful marketing tool.
As you localize your marketing content, you should not limit yourself to the formal language of the people, but explore the most widely spoken language in the country. You want to reach as many people as possible in that country or region.
Translate Technical Content
Different businesses will have their own unique vocabulary which will defer from business to business. A person dealing with foodstuffs will use vocabularies that are completely different from that of a person selling clothes, cars, or heavy machines. It is important that you localize this content so that the foreign markets will understand. Localizing will also involve making the content comprehensible; the customers need to know what each vocabulary means.
It is advisable to use professional website localization services that will go a long way to help you.
Localize your Legal Content
This is a very sensitive type of content to localize. You cannot paraphrase or change legal content as you localize it. The only thing that should guide you as you localize legal content are the local laws.
Ideally, your legal content should conform to the local laws given that customers will conduct business with you in the belief that you will follow your legal content to the letter. It is, therefore, important to make sure that you enlist the services of a professional when localizing legal content.
Localize Your System Content
The information on your website should be localized depending on the customer’s region. Some of the information that is commonly localized include time and date formats, time zones, currency, metric information (such kilometer as opposed to feet, pound as opposed to kilograms) and even physical and phone addresses.
Stay in Touch with Customers
Customers need to know where to find you, and when to find you. As such, you need to make all your contact information ranging from your physical address, telephone number, e-mail, and social media handle available to your customers. Moreover, you could make your physical location easily available to your customers on Google maps as well as times of operation. All this information needs to be localized into the language of the customer. For instance, while looking for the time of operation, the time available should be in the customer’s time zone, not your own. Local business markup information is also useful and can be obtained here.
When localizing your contact information, make sure that you enlist the services of professional website translators such as translate.com.
