Imagine that you have built your dream business from the ground up. You have spent countless nights awake working on everything you needed to make it thrive. And then finally it does; your business becomes a huge success, you’re raking in the money, and your dreams have become a reality.
You now have the potential to take your company to other countries. But wait—your company must then deal with other languages, cultures, time zones, currencies, etc. How are you going to prepare your entire business for that change?
More than just Translation
You are ready for localization. Localization is the process of preparing a product or service for use in a specific locale. A locale is the combination of a specific region’s language, cultural context, conventions, and market requirements.[1]
Consequently, localization includes not only translation but also the process of adapting the design and layout to display the translated text, adapting sorting functions to the alphabetical order of the different language, changing formats for dates and times, changing graphics to best fit the specific locale, and much more.[2] If a company wants to branch out, the code for their websites, apps, and other services needs to be written in a way that allows for these modifications.
If these things haven’t been implemented from the start, you would potentially need to find the time, money, and resources to completely remake your company for different countries. How can business owners and software developers plan for localization and avoid all that extra work?
Start Now
Before you act, think about implementing localization for your company. If businesses take time to learn about localization, adjust how they write their code, and alter how they organize the user interface before they start developing, they can save time and money when starting the actual localization process.
Help your software developers to view localization as an extension of product development. Treating it as an isolated task to tackle at the last stage of your product release will force your business to put everything on pause while you wait for content to be translated and prepared for the new locale.
Help the Translators
Text United, a translation software company, states that to allow for smoother localization, it is essential for developers to complete certain tasks before they begin writing the original code. For example, one task is to keep translatable content in external resource files. This way, when it is time for localization, all the content that needs to be changed is separate from your code.[3] Doing this allows translators to edit parts of the code that need translating without running the risk of messing with the code.
Another important task involves adding content-clarifying comments to the code. Comments are essential to include because without them, it is extremely difficult for a translator to know how to accurately translate certain words. Providing translators this information saves time and effort for both the translators and the programmers.
Think about your International Clients
You should plan ahead for the user interface; your software needs to be just as polished and organized in the localized version as in the original one. Translated content can expand or shorten in size and disrupt the format of your website’s content. Thus, you should plan out your user interface so that it will be able to accommodate all different types of translated text.[4]
Using industry-related words or complicated phrases in your user interface can make it difficult or even impossible to accurately translate your content into other languages. If you expect to take your product to another country, you should keep your original language as simple as possible.[5]
Localizing content gets especially complicated when one is translating it into a language that doesn’t use a Latin script. Some languages, such as Arabic or Hebrew, read right-to-left, while others, such as Chinese, Japanese, or Korean, read top-to-bottom.[6] Chinese, Japanese, and Korean also do not use spaces to separate words. To account for this, your application should avoid depending on line breaks and word-wrapping algorithms to display text. Planning for this ahead of time could save you from spending enormous amounts of time recreating your website.
To avoid these issues, developers should find a comprehensive localization platform and use it even before starting the translation and localization process. These platforms offer a higher level of customization, which developers need when creating content for a variety of languages with different characters and scripts.[7]
Preparing your Business
“It’s primarily in the business processes around globalizing software development where I see the most organizational pain, delays, and expenses endured when companies are reacting to demands of new customers in new locales or are undertaking strategic efforts globally,” says Giammarresi in Translation and Localization Project Management: The Art of the Possible.[8]
Essentially, as a business owner, you must hire developers that have a background knowledge of localization so they can prepare the code ahead of time and save you tons of work down the line. You also need to be prepared to do business in other countries with different cultures, laws, and norms. You must know what to expect when it comes time to start translating and localizing your content. By doing so, you won’t have to work away any more sleepless nights than necessary.
[1] J. B. Strother, “Preparing Material for the International Marketplace: More than Technical Localization Required,” Proceedings. IEEE International Professional Communication Conference,
(2002): 51–59. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1109/IPCC.2002.1049087.
[2] “Language Services,” Globalization and Localization Association, https://www.gala-global.org/knowledge-center/about-the-industry/language-services.
[3] Gosia, “5 Things Every Developer Should Know about Localization,” TU Press (blog), Text United, July 2, 2020, https://www.textunited.com/blog/developer-should-know-about-localization/.
[4] Gosia, “5 Things.”
[5] Dimitris Glezos, “Localization 101: A Beginner’s Guide to Software Localization,” Becoming Global (blog), Transifex, 2056.
[6] Gosia, “5 Things.”
[7] Glezos, “Localization 101.”
[8] Salvatore Giammarresi, “Strategic Views on Localization Project Management: The Importance of Global Product Management and Portfolio Management,” in , in Translation and Localization Project Management: The Art of the Possible, ed. Keiran J. Dunne and Elena S. Dunne (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011), 19.