Planning for Content and User Experience Localization in Web Content Management

There’s more to a localized website than text translation. It only takes one serious complaint from a frustrated potential customer who couldn’t reach the company through a U.S.-only toll-free number to bring that fact into painful reality.

Here are a few best practices for going beyond simple translation to the preparation of websites that really communicate to visitors in every region that’s important to your organization.

Planning Content

Use Straightforward Language: Avoid slogans and culturally specific examples that may be hard to understand and translate to other languages. By keeping things simple, you’ll be rewarded later with lower costs and consistent translations that work well for your audience.

Define a Style Guide to Standardize Your Content: Developing a style guide in the beginning will ensure consistency in translation across multiple languages (e.g., do you want to use a formal or informal voice?).

Develop a Localized SEO Strategy: Your localization vendor can help you determine the best localized keywords; however, outlining the target words for each page during the optimization of English content will help your localization vendor develop a more efficient keyword strategy.

Keep Your Terminology Consistent: Developing a glossary may seem time-consuming, but it will ensure consistent translation of terms and brands.

Verify Toll-free Numbers: If your localized pages contain toll-free or 1-800 numbers, make sure that these numbers are accessible from the target regions. If they’re not, provide alternate numbers.

Localize Multimedia: There are various options for localizing audio and video; from doing voiceover recordings to inserting localized subtitles.

Planning User Experience

Maintain Global Branding: Even though you may choose to customize your localized websites, it’s essential to keep a similar look-and-feel across regions. Defining standards for images, colors, tone, and logos will help maintain a consistent global image.

Be Cautious about Culturally Sensitive Images: An image can create opposite emotions in different parts of the world from what you as content creator might have meant to invoke. We recommend evaluating your images carefully and even customizing them for different regions.

Beware Privacy Laws: Remember that there are significant legal differences between countries regarding website visitor privacy. (For more on this subject, see Simon Lande’s article on The EU Cookies Law.)  For example, in some countries you don’t need to inform your web visitors that you’re collecting data about them, while in other countries, this act may be strictly forbidden.

Implement Language-selection Options: You’ll need to decide how to present each localized website to users. The best practice is to automatically set the language on landing by detecting each visitor’s language settings. An easily identifiable language selection box should also be present on the page to give visitors the ability to change the language as desired.

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This is an excerpt from “Designing Your Website with Localization in Mind.” You can read the full white paper here.

Hanna Golota is the operations lead and a project lead at Globalme Localization and Translation Services. With over seven years in the localization industry, she has managed many successful web localization projects.