Universal question: How do you make a large international company from a firm only pretending to be a cosmopolitan one? It’s simple - launch a foreign-language version of their website. Serious companies have long contemplated the adaptation of their web-presence to different languages. But if, for example, a Spanish version of the site looks like a translation from a schoolboy’s copybook, this means that the firm doesn’t care enough about its reputation.
A top-class website is your competitive advantage. A site that is adapted to various different languages is an even more significant advantage! Localization of the website is your key to achieving many goals. Here are just some:
- Broadening the audience of the site to those people in the domestic market who do not speak the state language, but speak English
- Offering goods or services to foreign markets
- The first step in the creation of representation in your prospective country of business.
Usually, the localization of a website is based on what markets your company wants to enter. Often, many languages are chosen at once. For Europe there is English, French, Italian and German. For Latin America there is, of course, Spanish. And then there’s the Asian countries – they have a whole plethora of languages. The localization of websites and software for these countries demands a huge amount of work.
Now we come to the question of how localization differs from simple translation. Suppose you want to launch your branded toothpaste in the Arabic market. The first means of achieving this goal is to translate your website into Arabic. You request a translation of the content and launch an Arabic version of the site. But six months later you discover that not one person has written on your feedback form. You then start to re-examine your advertising policy and the brand name of your toothpaste. Another year passes, and someone lets you in on a secret: The feedback form on your website does not recognize Arabic; the letter should be reading right to left, and not left to right! A small detail overlooked during the translation of the site to the new language. Add to this even more cultural peculiarities of nations specific to the understanding of information… Every language of the world has its idiosyncrasies, which can only be taken into consideration through complete localization of the website. Of course translating needs not only content, but also, as we say, making pictures from words. The localization of a website is a complicated job; not only linguistic, but also technical.
And now is time to make you an offer you cannot refuse. Word Perfect Translations has a special weapon in its arsenal – the localization of your website will only be carried out by native speakers from your chosen part of the world. If you request the translation and localization of a site into English, you can be certain that the translator will not only translate the text into his native language, but he will also adapt the concept of the site to suit the mentality of his fellow countrymen. The same applies to other languages.
In conclusion we would like to say that the localization of a website reminds the children’s designer in the adult version. First the site is dismantled into its constituent parts. Then these parts are altered to the linguistic and cultural peculiarities of another country. And finally, we again use this clever mechanism so as not to disturb its functionality. So now your site is put together and is already working for new customers.
