Global Markets: Choosing Ideal Localization Services Provider

Transcending Language Barriers

Language remains a significant barrier to market entry as companies go global markets. Yes, most of the internet is in English, but just 25 percent of users online speak English; meanwhile, languages such as Chinese, Spanish, and Arabic are growing rapidly.

Global markets penetration goes beyond simple linguistic translation. To be effective, a company’s products and services must be localized – carefully and precisely adapted for the cultural values, legal requirements, currencies, and user expectations of the target market connection with customers based on trust, and is critical to sales success in different parts of the world. 

If your business wants to successfully localize its products and services and reap the full benefits of global markets, it needs to work with professional localization service providers. This article provides an overview of localization services, helping you understand the different dimensions of localization services and how to decide which partner is the right choice for your business.

Demystifying Localization Services

Localization is the process of adapting a product or service to a local market, ensuring that its form, appearance, language, and cultural context are appropriate for that market. When done right, localization helps companies develop empathy with their customers, fostering a sense of belonging and familiarity.

Beyond mere linguistic translation, localization encompasses a multifaceted array of considerations, including:

• Adapting written content to resonate with local tastes and preferences
• Modifying layout and design to accommodate translated text seamlessly
• Curating visuals and imagery that resonate with the target audience
• Displaying the appropriate currency and units of measurement
• Adhering to local formats for addresses, phone numbers, and date representations
• Ensuring compliance with legal requirements and regional regulations

Localization services companies then create a multidisciplinary team, including translators, developers, designers, local marketing experts, linguists, and project managers, to create a consistent localized experience for the people who will see and use the localized product. Using cloud-based localization platforms, the team members can share resources, ideas, and information regardless of time zone, location, or language background.

The Localization Dream Team

Localization is a concert of competencies orchestrated by diverse experts contributing to their respective competencies. This dream team usually includes: 

1. Linguists (Translators, Editors, Proofreaders): Translate and localize the content into the target language, improving naturalness, keeping localization best practices and cultural relevance in check, and linguistic testing to ensure the localized content is fit for purpose and acceptable.
2. Developers: Prepare the product or website codebase for localization compatibility so the text can expand and contract without breaking the layout (including the strings appearing in the files). Software localization engineers: Make sure that no strings are hard-coded.
3. UX and UI Designers: Localization-friendly design that adapts the layout, user interface, and graphics to the specificities of the target market, taking into account text length and writing direction.
4. Localization or Translation Project Manager: Referees of the localization process, these managers ‘manage the people’ on the localization team. They define objectives, adapt to feedback or changes, manage deadlines and budgets, and centralize job information on a localization platform for all team players to work together.
5. Local Marketing Experts: With an intimate knowledge of the target market, they advise the development of localization strategies, conduct cultural trend research, and refine efforts to meet business goals, including local SEO (search engine optimization) to improve online visibility.

When to Leverage Localization Services

Localization services can help your business gain momentum – whether you’re a startup trying to go global market for the first time or a long-time international player already localized in several markets. These services might help in the following situations:

• To New Markets: If you localize early on, you can confidently take your product or service to new markets with an instant aura of trust and relevance.
• Expand the Existing Market: Even after securing a position in new markets, continuous localization efforts are essential to staying ahead of the competition and keeping business growing by responding to the changing needs of local users. 
• Increased Engagement and Retention: Localization increases your audience and engagement with existing customers to prevent churn and increase loyalty over time by providing a more localized and localized experience.
• Maintaining Brand Identity: During localization, our services help keep your brand identity and messaging and unify your global presence by ensuring that your brand speaks the language of each market.

In our fast-paced and globalized world, the list of applications for localization services is constantly expanding. You may want to sell a localized version of your software, introduce a mobile app into a new market, publish a website in multiple languages, launch a video game on a global scale, or provide multilingual support for your customers. Whatever the case, localization makes it possible to open new revenue streams, deepen relationships with your customers, and create a solid foundation to develop your business in any market, now and in the future.

Tailoring Localization Services to Your Needs

Depending on your product or service, localization goals, and budget, you might need one or more of the following services: 

• Software Localization Services: Adapting the interface, visual design, and user experience of applications (apps or web-based tools) while retaining the core functionality to align with the linguistic, cultural, and legal requirements of a target market.
• App Localization Services: Similar to software localization but focused on mobile apps, this service helps optimize them for different devices, local standards, and user expectations to increase discoverability, adoption rates, and return on investment in the target market.
• Website Localization Services: Written content, visual/graphic elements, the user experience, and the functionality of a website are adjusted to make the site more culturally relevant to users in a specific location (SEO Localization sometimes makes the content appropriate for search engines in a particular area).
• Video Game Localization Services: Video game localization adjusts storylines, character development, user interface, and in-game copy to provide players in target markets with an immersive and culturally resonant gaming experience. 
• Localized Marketing: By modifying your marketing site, social media, product descriptions, advertising campaigns), and processes to meet the needs of a specific target market, marketing localization will increase brand discoverability, reputation, and revenue. 
• Technical Localization Services: Knowledge bases, user manuals, help files, software documentation, FAQs, and how-to videos all need localizing to ensure that they have the right tone, are culturally sensitive, read correctly, and are totally clear to the user in any given market (and often support multilingual customer support initiatives).
• Localization Testing Services: Also known as L10n, this is a quality assurance service that ensures that the localized product or service works as intended, meets the cultural and technical expectations, follows the linguistic standards of the target market, and is a delightful user experience.

The Hallmarks of Professional Localization Services

Although human skills are the most critical factor in localizing a product, good professional localization services do not rely on human skills alone. The best providers use technology and localization expertise to maintain quality, consistency, and efficiency.

Using localization software, such as translation management systems (TMS) or localization platforms, to integrate into their tech stack, professional localization service providers can automate workflows and gain control over projects of any size while still maintaining quality. Application programming interfaces (APIs) allow localization tools to communicate with each other, transferring data and automating many processes.

It’s possible because of localization platforms that allow providers to automate elements such as content extraction, leverage AI-driven machine translation, and programmatically reintegrate translated content back into source files. This is where modern localization tools and human expertise meet to serve you the best of both worlds.

Key Features of Localization Software

The following cornerstone features are a great place to start when evaluating localization software. They can help ensure your localization processes are well-supported, automated, and scalable.

With cloud-based localization, you can access your files and information from any device, anytime, anywhere. 

• Flexibility: Make sure the tool allows you to easily add or remove users and features as your localization needs change and your organization grows, and it provides a smooth migration path between projects.
• API Support and Integrations: APIs help localization tools communicate with your existing tech stack. They can automatically pull content into your localization tool, translate it, and push it back into your CMS or other tools.
• Translation Memory: This feature behaves precisely like the Find-Replace feature described above, except that it replaces the text it finds with the translation it has stored previously. This means you don’t have to re-translate content you’ve translated in the past, saving time and money on future projects.
• Easy File Search: An intuitive search function that allows for the search of files and/or content without knowing exact file names, streamlining workflows for larger projects.
• Intuitive User Interface: Choose tools with an intuitive user interface that minimizes training needs and is easy for your team to learn, even if they are not technically savvy.
• Customization Options: Localization software must be modular to adapt to project requirements, such as adding support for specific file formats or creating custom workflows.
• Scalability: Make sure that your localization software charges based on usage so that you can scale up and down without incurring overages.

The Power of a Localization Platform

Localizing your content with a localization platform is a much more reliable, efficient, and agile process than manual localization:

Using a localization platform will improve their localization efforts and increase quality control while speeding up market time, providing global markets customers with a better localized experience.

Evaluating and Choosing the Ideal Localization Services Provider

So, when you’re looking for a localization services provider, think about what you need and what you’re trying to achieve, and take the following into account:

• Target markets: Some LSPs have expertise in particular geographic markets, while others are more global. Consider this in light of your target markets.
• Alignment of Work Flow: Whether your localization process is agile, lean, or more traditional, it is essential to choose an LSP that can adapt to your communication flow and work speed.
• Content Volume: Consider how much content you produce daily, weekly, or monthly. Some LSPs use a high content volume, which means that a lot of content is translated by numerous translators, and thus, the quality and consistency might suffer.
• Rollout Approach: If you plan to launch concurrently in multiple markets, make sure your LSP has the localization technology and processes to handle concurrent workflows for various regions.
• Quality Assurance (QA) Requirements: Determine whether your LSP offers built-in QA or if you have staff who can perform quality checks before going live.
• File Format Support: Make sure your LSP can handle the file formats in which you conduct your business, create tools, and manage your content.
• Content Complexity: For highly technical or dense content, you should also look for LSPs that offer in-context translation via automated UI screenshots within their localization platform.
• Turnaround Times: Assess if your LSP can meet your deadlines. Smaller providers are likely to be slower, but bigger players have more resources and can often turn around a project faster. 
• Scalability Plans: Think about whether or not you’ll be adding frequent updates, new content production, or expanding language combinations, and choose an LSP that has the 
• Service Level Agreements: Negotiate a legally binding agreement that specifies service levels, support responsibilities, and contingency plans for potential localization-related breakdowns. 

Suppose you evaluate these factors and choose an LSP suited to your business. In that case, your localization will flow like a well-tuned engine, and you will be on the road to successfully reaching customers and harnessing global markets.

Unlocking Global Opportunity with Localization Services

As the world continues to become more connected, localization services are the bridge that helps businesses cross the divide of language barriers, open doors to new markets and opportunities, and cater products, services, and messaging to diverse audiences across markets in a way that builds trust, loyalty, and sustainability. 

To fully take advantage of localization, it is advisable to pick the right type of service to match the content and context, use technology solutions to save time and money in the long run, and engage with a provider who offers the best quality, speed, and service level to suit your needs. 

Start localizing your business confidently, and soon, your company will be crossing borders, speaking a language your customers understand, and accessing markets with ten times the growth potential.