To build a solid reputation for your brand in a foreign market, you must have a good understanding of local customers’ interests and cultural nuances. To ace the localization, you need to do in-depth research on the market that you’re taping in. Localization is a challenging job, and doing it right is even more difficult, especially if you don’t understand the cultural aspects of your target marketplaces. Even the big brands have made some stupid localization mistakes in the past that could have had a devastating impact on their business in foreign markets.
In this article, we are going to discuss the top mistakes that companies made in brand localization solutions. It is important to have a closer look at those mistakes to avoid them in the first place.
5 Major Localization Mistakes to Avoid
Taking your brand to a foreign market is not that simple, there are a lot of things that you have to consider while targeting global markets. Make sure you are not making any mistakes that could affect your brand persona.
Using Open-Source Translations
This is one of the most common mistakes made by companies when they conveniently use free tools for translation and don’t spend any money on professional translations. This is the worst that you can do with your global brand. Translations have a huge impact on your overall brand personality, so you have to do it the right way. Make sure you are only getting your brand translations done by professionals only, who have good experience in the industry. Moreover, the best you can do is to hire native translators. If you want some technological assistance, make sure you are getting your hands on professional translation management software. Also, always consider well-reputed software for translation purposes, because not every professional tool is worth your money.
Not Considering the Cultural Nuances
When it comes to localizing your brand to local preferences, culture is the most important thing to consider. If your brand is not culture-appropriate, it becomes hard for you to resonate with local customers. Your customers would be unable to connect with your brand and always see you as a foreign company. The purpose of localization is to make your brand look and feel more local. It is only possible when you have a good understanding of the cultural and social intricacies of a specific marketplace.
Most companies totally ignore the cultural aspect of localization which can result in your brand having a hard time in a foreign country. Sometimes companies assume that they know a culture; in reality, they are missing out on little details that do matter to locales. To overcome this issue you can hire a professional culture consultant; you have a good know-how of your target country’s culture.
Limiting Localization to Translation Only
There is a major misconception about localization that most companies still have. That is: localization is just a fancy word used for translation. People use localization and translation interchangeably, considering they are synonyms. This is also the main reason why some companies only do translations and think they are done with their brand localization. In reality, localization is a much broader concept than just translations. In brand localization, you have to take care of design, development, formats as well as translations. Localization is not all about translations; translations are indeed an important aspect of localization.
So, translating the textual aspect of your brand is just the first step, you have to consider other things as well to fully transform your brand into a new marketplace.
Using Same Formats for All Regions
Most websites have a digital clock on top that shows the current time to the users. Well, showing the time in the right formats is also important. People living in different parts of the world are used to seeing their time in different formats. For example, some countries use a 12-hour clock, and others use a 24 hours clock. So, you have to consider these intricacies and change the formatting to the local preferences. Similarly, the format to write dates is also different in all countries. Not just that, you must offer your users the payment methods that they are more familiar with. You can use a project management platform to make it easier for you to manage your localization operations.
Doing this would significantly enhance your user experience on the website and reduce your bounce rate.
Hardcoding The Digital Platforms
Localizing digital platforms such as websites, mobile apps, and software is not easy at all. So, you better start building your digital platform keeping localization in mind from the very beginning. Hardcoding your digital platforms could make it much harder for developers to localize them afterward. They have to make a lot of changes to the code or even need to write the whole code from scratch.
It makes the localization processes very time-consuming and challenging for the developers. So, it is always recommended to build your websites and apps using Unicode. It makes your overall digital platforms more adjustable to every new marketplace because nothing is hardcoding inside the code. That’s why you should have a team of developers who understand Unicode and have some experience working on it.
Conclusion
Before starting your brand localization journey, make sure you have all the equipment and tools required. Having professional translation management software can really help you achieve better results in less time. While designing your localization solution, make sure you are not making the mistakes stated in the article. If you want to outsource the localization project, you better partner with reliable language service providers only.
