13/07/2016

Today, potential customers primarily go to one place for information about products, services and other offers – the internet. This top method nearly always leads to one of the many search engines which requires nothing more than a few simple keywords…

Today, potential customers primarily go to one place for information about products, services and other offers – the internet. This top method nearly always leads to one of the many search engines which requires nothing more than a few simple keywords to get the desired results within a matter of seconds. This explains why Google alone now processes over 3.5 billion search queries per day, that is 40 000 search queries a second!

The World Wide Web therefore gives any company, regardless of whether they are active nationally or internationally, the opportunity to reach its customers at any time. Of course, for this to happen, it is important to be found in the first place in the flood of websites. When visitors first land on a website, one thing counts above all others – the first impression. It is not enough to know visitors’ preferences here, they have to actually be met. This presents even globally active companies with a considerable challenge.

When choosing a language for their international audience, many companies opt to use English. In fact, English may be the global lingua franca and the language of business in the 21st century, and most visitors to your website may understand it, but numerous studies have shown that people will not only spend longer on a site but are also more likely to buy a product when information is available in their own language.

This is where localisation comes into play.

Localisation (from the Latin locus, meaning ‘place’) means adapting your products, programs, websites and more to a regional market. This involves taking local linguistic, cultural and technical factors into account, for example suitable formats for web pages and program windows, preferred colours and fonts, correct date and time formats, and even your target audience’s sense of humour.

In other words, the aim of any localisation project is to create the impression that the content was created especially for the market in question and is not simply a poor copy of the original. Localising text is one of the most important and time-consuming aspects of this process, because it involves much more than a straightforward translation.

To make sure your localisation project goes as smoothly as possible, we have put together a short checklist containing the most important points to remember for successful website localisation. Learn more on our blog: „Are you global ready“.