What is Website Localization?

Introduction

Have you ever seen some advertisements that are catered around your current trends? For example, Spotify understanding the current trends of the youth and displaying ads like this classic: group of friends always plan a long trip but it always remain in the chats 😀

Or you might have seen google’s sign in page in different languages:

Here is another example of the famous brand: IKEA. They use localization heavily to create unique experience. For example, IKEA’s main idea was to sell furniture which can be assembled at home with their instruction manual. This is a good approach in most of the countries but in China assembling the furniture is considered to be an opposite symbol. They prefer furniture to be assembled by some handyman or a third party service.

IKEA was left to either provide assembly service as well or leave the China market. IKEA took the first approach and introduced assembly service specific to China. This helped them to increase their market hold there by multiple folds.

You can see this experience on IKEA’s website, here is a quick look of India and China version of the website

This example was inspired from here. You can read more about Ikea’s localization strategies on the same.

All these examples you see are focused on improving the user’s experience. It takes a lot of research and understanding of the user’s region to come up with this user experience. But websites like these makes use you of concept called as website localization to achieve the same.

So in this blogpost, we will be exploring website localisation, how it differs from translation and its multiple use cases.

So without any further ado, let us get started!!

What is Website Localisation?

Website localisation is a method/a way to make sure the website adapts to the user’s location so that the experience is enhanced.

Adaption of a website based on user’s location can mean a lot of things like:

• Making sure the website’s content is aligned correctly i.e. LTR or RTL.
• Making sure the images, audio and videos are appropriate as per the user’s region.
• Making sure the text is translated according to the user’s location.

Combining all the ways of adaption, website try to create a personalised experience for the user which make them feel familiar and isn’t hard to navigate.

Is Website localisation same as text translation ?

We can say that text translation is a part of localisation i.e. localisation is a super set of text translation.

Website localisation includes adapting the website’s content as per the user’s region. But translation is converting the text to the language which is native at the user’s location.

It is important to note that text translation should also cater to the user’s dialect to provide an optimum experience. We will talk more about this in the coming sections.

Use Cases of Website Localization

Website localisation is highly useful for businesses who are trying to have a global reach. By global reach, we mean that they want to expand to other countries so that they can increase their business.

The examples of such business are everywhere from e-commerce, food industries, pharmaceutical to automobile industries. With the help of localisation it helps these businesses to expand further and show their capabilities on how they cater the needs of their customers.

I feel website localisation is very important for businesses mentioned above because:

• It tells that the company fosters user empathy.
• It makes sure that user are comfortable and they feel safe while browsing their websites.
• Provides correct interpretation of what the user needs.

Let us look at a couple of ways through which localisation has helped businesses empathise more towards users:

Text Translation

Often not people think that website localisation is nothing but text translation. But yeah that being partially true website localisation is much more than that. As we saw above that it is a super set of text translation.

Text translation is the key aspect of website localisation. People think that, why should we manually translate a website were we already have google translate that will help us to do that on the fly. While that being true in some cases, the translation provided cannot be always correct.

The translation provided by these app should make sure that they also match the dialect of the user location.

For example, google translate can make mistakes, such as:

• "Take a hike" vs. "Haz una caminata": In English, "take a hike" is often used as a rude dismissal, while in Spanish, "haz una caminata" simply means "take a walk."
• "Y'all" - A common Southern American English term, it can be challenging to translate accurately, often resulting in awkward or incorrect phrases.
• "Mate" - A common Australian and British term for friend, it can be misinterpreted in other cultures.

So text translation which involves professional translation services can recognize idioms and find equivalent phrases in the target language to maintain the same tone.

Text translated by these apps can also contract or expand the text space. This in turn affects the spacing and layout on the page. So it becomes beneficial to have custom translation placed on the website to avoid such scenarios. Here is a quick example of IKEA’s language change section differs in text sizes when language is changed from english to arabic.

Similar text in the Arabic text is smaller:

Content Relevance And Placement

Another key aspect of website localisation is the making sure the content is relevant and placed correctly on the website.

Content Relevance

If you have observed food chains such as McDonald’s or KFC, they have different menus for different countries. They make sure that menu are created in such a way that the items available, are as per the local traditions and adhere to the culture neutral zone.

For example, In US you would find a big mac burger made out beef patty, it’s equivalent in India is Maharaja Mac burger with a chicken patty.

Content Placement

Another important factor on websites is the content placement. Let us look at this via examples,

Websites needs to make sure that their content caters for users from all the regions. A person from a middle eastern region, would generally prefer their text to be placed in right to left format instead of left to right.

Here is a look at how the IKEA’s website looks like for an arabic region as compared to the India version of the website:

As you can see in the above images that text is preferred in right to left format for Arabic region as compared to the India version. Another keen example of content placement in this scenario is the placement of the language change button(highlighted in green) and the tablist(highlighted in blue). If you see, for Arabic region both the button and tablist starts from right which isn’t the case for Indian region of the site.

These minute details creates a thoughtful user experience for a variety of regions. Thus content placement is one of the important aspects of the website localization.

Hyperlocalisation

It is a kind of localisation that is very specific to the user’s needs and most of the time it caters to user’s preferences. This helps the websites create a deeper and personalized impact with the user. We can consider hyperlocalisation to be an advanced version of website localisation which focuses much on content relevance.

A classic example that I found here is with Spotify. They shared this ad which targeted the users from Mumbai who can related to being stuck in a heavy traffic:

There are a lot of examples on hyperlocalization, some of them we saw in the introduction section of the blog. Hence it is important for products that revolve around user’s bevhavior to have hyper-localization.

How can this be achieved?

There are many products out there such as Lokalize, Crowdin, Weglot, Adobe Target, etc can be used to achieve these experiences. Diving into the details and the general working of these products is out of scope of this blog post. But do give these products a try.

Summary

In this blogpost, we learned various aspects of website localization including it’s definition and how it differs from text translation. We also delved into various use cases which achieve website localization and how they create an impactful user experience.

So that’s all folks!. Hope you like my blog post.

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