This is an excerpt of the full article by Julio Leal, Head of Localization at Ciena, published in the Brand Quarterly & Brand2Global ‘Global Marketing’ Special Edition.
Adaptation is all about survival. If a website is to survive and succeed, it needs to adapt constantly – the alternative isn’t an option.
But what happens when a company has multiple websites, each of them serving a specific local market in its native language and with its’ own local peculiarities? Simple – the company’s adaptation effort multiplies exponentially.
Many companies wrongly believe they are prepared for the exponential content and management growth resulting from localization. The first clear sign of this error is that a company’s website localization strategy is not, directly or indirectly, managed by a localization professional. Frequently, organizations give website localization oversight responsibilities to a marketing team that has very limited knowledge of the particular challenges of localization.
If there is no localization manager on the team yet, consider hiring one. This person will be able to determine the best content translation approach, engage with the right vendors, establish quality metrics, and ensure a fair price for any translations. In addition, having staff assigned to this specialized role will help the company’s localization model mature more rapidly.
Additionally, when analyzing the local or regional markets to target, companies often consider translation to be imperative. Due to the peculiarities of some industries and countries, and depending on whether the company is in a B2B or B2C category, English might be the language used (and expected) by the target audience in that specific market.
For example, Ciena recently ceased providing full support for Arabic in the Middle East region after discovering that, due to the fact that many users of Ciena content in that market were educated in British and North-American universities, English is the preferred language of business for that region. Companies that do not speak their customers’ language risk losing their business.
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You can read the full article online at BrandQuarterly.com as an individual website article or check out this and much more great content in the Brand Quarterly & Brand2Global ‘Global Marketing’ Special Edition.
