The vast majority of global consumers do not speak English and they prefer to shop online in their own language. So the answer to the first question when preparing to sell your product in a foreign market is, yes, it’s essential to translate online marketing content, including the software that drives it. Translation by professional language service providers is the best way to be certain that every detail is correct. Machine translation will always stumble at some point, and the resulting quality reduction can destroy your credibility.
Your company’s website and apps are the most powerful links you have to your international customers. To ensure that your foreign-market websites, apps, and games are operating perfectly and reaching the intended audience, you need software localization. This process includes technical software testing for functionality, cultural analysis for 100% appropriate content and design, and linguistic accuracy throughout the texts and software code strings.
The aim of software localization is to create a website, app, or game that engages your potential customers in every one of your markets, making them feel that it was created specifically for them. For the most cost-efficient and accurate software localization in multiple foreign markets, the process should really begin in the beta stage of development. That is, all software for your products and marketing should be prepared with localization in mind from the earliest stages, with space incorporated for different languages, scripts, cultures, currencies, time zones, etc. This is called internationalization, and it’s the phase when your company is laying the foundation for its brand, marketing, and products to reach foreign audiences. Internationalization enables the final release of localized software products to take place simultaneously in all markets, as smoothly as possible and with the least hassle.
Excellent user experience with your product, app, game, or website’s software depends on how easy it is for the user to feel a cultural familiarity and functional ease with it. Software localization is most likely to achieve this goal when you take the following steps:
• Internationalize your software during the design and development phase, including programming dynamic UI expansion into your software, and coding strings in a way that avoids concatenation so that text extraction is easy to do.
• Analyze your website, app, or game content to determine the details that will need to be changed for each locale, and tag those points with uniform placeholders in the software.
• Extract files for translation, from the app, website, game, or other product.
• Translate texts from these files into the target language(s) and include placeholder tags for details that will change with each locale.
• Localize graphics, media, and scripts, a process that includes research and native understanding of the target audience(s) and language(s).
• Reintegrate translated texts and localized elements such as graphics into the software coding.
• Run thorough functionality tests of your software for every target locale.
• Introduce your product to your target countries.
Localization of your products’ software elements is an exciting process that is essential to successful international expansion. When it’s done well, software localization is truly the key that opens doors to thousands of new customers. Skrivanek’s software localization teams offer technical, linguistic, and cultural expertise together in one team, to support the global expansion of your brand through a single contact point. We are an ideal software localization partner for companies who wish to reach multiple new foreign markets, whether they do or do not have a presence in their target countries.
J. V. McShulskis
