Brand localization is essential for any company that wants to capture international markets. Professional localization solutions allow global enterprises smoothly penetrate foreign markets and reach out to wider audiences. However, doing your localization right is crucial to driving the desired results in global markets. Even after spending thousands of dollars on localization, businesses tend to make some major mistakes in their localization processes. It is important for global businesses to be mindful of those mistakes and take the right steps to avoid them.
In this article, we will be discussing some common mistakes businesses are likely to make in their brand localization that must be avoided.
What Not to Do While Managing Your Brand Localization Project?
Do Not Hard Code Any Element
Localization has a bad reputation for being a very time-consuming process that delays the brand’s time to market. Well, most of the time, adopting wrong localization approaches lengthen the overall localization project executions. When it comes to software or website localization, hard coding user-facing elements and text in the code is the worst thing to do. It makes it very troublesome for translators to extract the textual content from the code and translate it. Similarly, developers have to spend hours decoding the elements and localizing them for each targeted region. It also makes your localization time-consuming. On the flip side, keeping your user-facing elements outside the code makes the localization agile and seamless.
Do Not Write Text on Images
We all know translation is important for your international brand expansion. But you have to make sure that you are not putting any textual content on images. If you do so, you may need to replace all images placed on your website and software. You have to recreate all graphics with content translations so that it is understandable for your target audience. Keep your usual elements independent of translations to avoid making extra efforts while doing localization.
Do Not Split the Strings
When it comes to translating your content to multiple languages, you better avoid splitting the translation spring at all costs. There is nothing more challenging for a translator than to find the contextual background of a text with broken strings. However, strong might get broken for many reasons, such as a string containing content with two different text styles, or there is a variable in the string.
So, there should be no string splitting; otherwise, it may cause issues for your translation team.
Do Not Ignore the Cultural Relevance
Localization is all about making your product and services resonate with the target culture. So, if you think just translating your textual content into regional languages is enough, you are missing out on something really important. From your product design, and packaging to the marketing campaign, everything has to be localized considering the cultural nuances of a region. If you are not already familiar with the target culture, you can hire a culture consultant or get a professional localization solution for enterprises from some reliable LSP. You can partner with a local LSP to assist you with your brand globalization journey.
Do not Treat all Language Scripts the Same
When it comes to translating your content and adjusting the translated content into the software or website, you can’t treat all languages the same. For instance, not all languages are written left to right; languages like Arabic, Urdu, Persian, Azeri, and Hebrew are written from right to left. So, it is important to make your website design adjustable to different language scripts. Your website design should be responsive enough to get adjusted to different scripts. Similarly, some languages take up more space than others, so make sure to provide sufficient space for translations. Otherwise, the text might get overlapped with other elements, which will completely mess up your user-facing elements.
Do Not Forget to Employ the Latest Translation Management System
The use of translation localization methods is becoming obsolete, and companies are looking for advanced translation and localization tools instead. These latest tools are cost-effective, faster, and efficient when it comes to managing your overall localization tasks. You can use a professional localization management platform to streamline your workflow, manage localization teams, translate high volumes of content, and effectively manage your translation resources from one place. Based on your unique localization needs, you can tailor your TMS specifications accordingly.
Summing Up!
Any global brand that wants to maximize its profit in foreign markets needs to constantly work on perfecting its localization approaches. Getting your brand localization right will open up new opportunities for your business, you can better engage with target customers and get an edge over competitors.
Moreover, you must have the right translation and localization tools in place to keep your localization workflow optimized. MarsHub is also a reliable localization management platform to consider, especially if you are working on large-scale localization projects.