How to Localize a Website Faster?

Digitization has enabled businesses, all around the world, to reach global audiences more conveniently and effectively than ever. Internet technology has made it super easy for companies to reach international markets and sell their products and services to global customers. That means more customers, more sales, and more profit.

However, it is not that simple. The global competition between businesses is also increasing, making it harder for companies to survive in the global marketplace.

Businesses have to build a robust online multilingual presence globally to develop a strong brand persona. For this, you have to localize your website for every region.

This blog post discusses the significance of a multilingual website for global business and how one can localize their website faster for international markets.

Why is Website Localization Important?

Most businesses ask questions like, why do they need to localize their website? How can localization help them earn more revenue? Well, localization is perhaps the best thing you can do for your global business expansion. When you localize your brand to the local needs of the customers, you are creating more relevance and your target audiences can better connect with your product and services.

It is estimated from research that around 40% of customers don’t buy a product if it is not in their native language. Undoubtedly, language is the primary source of communication between a company and its customers.

When you translate your brand message into the local language, you can better communicate with your customers and build long-lasting relations with them. Localizing your brand would eliminate the cultural barriers, and you can smoothly enter a foreign marketplace.

How to Do Website Localization Faster?

Website localization is one of the major aspects of your global business expansion. You should localize your website appropriately to create a more personalized online experience for targeted audiences. Following are the best practices you should follow to localize your website quickly in the fastest turnaround time.

Do Market Research

To make a strong localization strategy, you must have done the market research properly. One thing you should keep in mind is, not every market is meant for your business, and just because your business is doing well in the local market, it does not necessarily work in a foreign market. Before making your business expansion plan, you should be aware of all favourable markets for your business growth.

For this, you have to do complete market research analyzing the cultures, social norms, customer preferences, and other factors of different regions where you want to expand your business. You can conduct online surveys, or test your product on a patch of customers to understand their reaction to your brand. For every market, you have to change your brand persona a bit, so it can blend in with the cultural norms.

Start With a Plan

The second step after conducting market research would be to develop an effective localization plan. This is the most significant step because the overall success of your localization strategy depends on you having a business goal in mind while making that plan.

All of your localization tasks should be aligned with your business growth goals. Everything should be very clear in your mind from the beginning. From resource allocation to financial management, you have to consider various factors while making your localization strategy.

Make sure that you have all the tools and resources required for the successful accomplishment of the localization project. During project planning, you should also assemble a professional and qualified localization team to handle your project. Once you have developed an effective strategy for website localization, it’s time to start actual work.

Employ A TMS

Traditionally, the localization tasks are managed manually. From translation management to other localization operations, everything is managed by human translators, managers, and developers.

Why You Need a TMS

Manual translation management is not just time-consuming, but it is complicated as well. It also slows down the overall localization project and leads to a lot of errors. That’s why it is important to have a professional TMS tool in place to optimize your localization operations. TMS would save you time by automating the translation operations and making the overall localization procedure hassle-free. These systems have various features to make your overall translation and localization tasks easier and effortless. Based on your unique business needs, you can customize your TMS that would fulfil all of your business growth goals.

As most of your localization and translation tasks are managed by machines with minimal human intervention, there are fewer chances of errors. You’ll be wasting less time eradicating blunders made by humans.

Improved Efficiency

Traditional file management is not suitable to meet the current demands of global businesses. Complex localization tasks take a lot of time and effort which reduces the overall employee work efficiency and performance. These tools are also very effective when it comes to promoting effective communication between localization teams.

If you have localization teams working at a remote location, having a cloud-based TMS would allow your remote employee to collaborate with a house team in real time. TMSs enable better communication and enhance project transparency because everyone has access to the same version of files and documents. There would be fewer chances of redundant data and repeated information.

Moreover, less time is wasted on sending the file back and forth to other team members. There is no need to send excessive emails to employees because whenever an update happens in a project it is notified to all employees on the TMS.

Automated Translations

Translation is one of the most critical aspects of localization, and it has the greatest impact on your customers. Translating the content into the native languages of customers helps the brand better connect with global audiences. Most businesses hire professional translators to do website translations, but the process is very time-consuming.

First of all, there are more chances of grammatical, and spelling errors in human translations. A lot of time is wasted mitigating and eliminating those errors.

The more you expand your business to the international market, the more translations you would need in multiple languages.

Fast and Quality Results

The demand for localization continuously increases as your business grows. You have to translate high volumes of content into different languages which will take a lot of time and effort if you’re depending on human translators.

In this scenario, you need a machine translation tool that will generate automated translations quickly, so you can easily manage the localization workloads. MT tools use advanced AI technology to generate translations that are high quality and in context. Some tools are so powerful that they can do human-like translations. It will also save up your money because you don’t have to pay salaries to full-time translators, and machines would handle most of your translation load.

However, even after getting a TM tool, you would still need some professional translators and editors to proofread and review your translations.

Hire Freelancers

Your localization workload keeps increasing as your business expands to multiple foreign markets. It becomes more challenging for your in-house employees to manage the translation and localization work. Heavy workloads on employees also lead to blunders and performance issues.

In this case, project managers can outsource their localization tasks to professional freelancers. Most managers hesitate to outsource their projects and keep loading work on their full-time employees. It can badly impact their work efficiency and lead to a lot of quality issues as well.

Improved TAT

For faster website localization, you must outsource excessive workloads to freelancers to ensure the timely completion of your localization project. There are many professional freelance translators and localization experts out there offering high-quality services. You can hire them on a contractual basis and pay them per task.

Freelancers have online profiles that would give you an idea about their work experience, expertise, and rates.

In the beginning, rather than handing over the complete localization project to a freelancer, you better start by assigning small tasks. It will help you smartly manage the localization tasks.

Website Internationalization

When it comes to localization, you have to modify all aspects of your website, including designs, layouts, formatting of other elements, etc. For this, you need to hire qualified developers who are good at writing Unicode.

If you want to build a website for international markets, you have to internationalize all elements in a way that can easily be modified to the preferences of all regions. For instance, payment methods, date & time, currency, etc. are different in all-region. To make your brand look more native you have to adapt your website component to the cultural, social, and legal aspects of that market.

Hard coding will only complicate the localization process, and you have to spend a lot of time adjusting your website for every new region. Unicode, on the other hand, makes the localization process much easier. Your code gets automatically adjusted to every region, and there is no need to put much time and effort into localizing your website.

Wrapping Up!

Summing up the whole discussion, you can say that localization is a major aspect of your business expansion plan. Localizing your website is essential to building a multilingual brand image globally. For fast website localization, you must be following all the steps mentioned in this article.

You can also contact a professional localization service provider to do the job. There are many localization agencies offering reasonable translation and localization services to enterprises. You can get help from them to reduce your localization workloads and get your localization project completed in the fastest turnaround time.