What do you mean by localization?
Quite often, localization is confused with translation, but these two terms are not the same. Language translation is an important part of localization and it could be streamlined and facilitated through automatic language translation. But that is not all that there is to localization. Translation is just one part of localization. Localization, as a whole, is a more extensive concept and involves tweaking content, products, or services to suit a specific location or market.
Localization is about adapting content, products, and services to meet the preferences, sentiments, and language of a particular audience or target market. It involves making changes to your content, products, and services to make them more relevant to your target audience or target market and to suit the ‘look and feel’ that they prefer and want.
If you want to be a truly global brand, you need to be locally relevant across all your target markets and regions. You can’t afford to merely be globally present; you need to be globally local.
The McDonald’s menu is a powerful example of localization at its best. They change the products on their menus according to the tastes and sentiments of the people in the country which they operate in. They even change the names of their offerings to incorporate elements from the local language.
Localization is all about revamping and delivering your offerings according to the preferences of the local market.
If you want to pull off your localization task successfully, your content, products, or services should look like they have been developed keeping the local culture in mind, or even within the local culture.
Sometimes, a product or service is developed so that it is rather easy to achieve localization. The anticipation of localization requirements is sometimes known as an Internationalization effort. The whole process of making it possible for a product to be localized and then localizing it for various national audiences is sometimes referred to as product globalization.
Localization goes beyond language translation and it involves adapting other elements to the target market as well. These adaptions could include: editing graphics and design to properly display translated text, tweaking content to suit local preferences, converting values to local currencies and units of measurement, making use of locally accepted formatting for elements like dates, addresses and phone numbers, and even addressing local regulations and legal requirements.
Sometimes, in business contexts, you might see the word localization being shortened to L10n. The "10" signifies the ten letters that lie between the first letter, "L," and its last letter, "n," in the word ‘localization’.
Why is localization important?
Localization is extremely important if you want to be accepted in all your markets. If you have standardized content, products, and services in every single one of your markets and regions, you won’t be able to capture your customers’ hearts and minds.
Without localization, your customers in different countries and regions will see you as an outsider, someone whom they might not trust as much. But if you engage in localization, they will start looking at you as one of their own, someone who understands them and deserves their trust.
Additionally, if you do not offer content and support in the local language, your customers may not be able to understand you or connect with you. If your marketing material is not localized, your customers may just not bother to learn more about you. If you do not offer localized support, your customers will get frustrated. They’ll figure that your brand is not meant for them, it is for outsiders. That would result in churn as well as negative word of mouth.
Localization has also proven to make content more appealing and increase the likelihood of your target audeince making purchases. A 2014 Common Sense Advisory report has shown that 75 percent of consumers would be more likely to purchase goods and services if the corresponding product information is in their native language. Because of that fact, any business that is trying to tap into international markets, or markets in which regional languages are spoken consider localization as well as translation. If you really want to tap into these markets, you should localize more than just your website. You would also need to localize your marketing materials, including TV, radio, and print ads, your product manuals, training materials, online help, user interfaces quick-start guides, service materials, product warranty materials, and your disclosure documents, like terms and conditions
What is localization used for?
Localization is used by companies for the purposes of expand their reach to new audiences, building credibility, and increasing sales. It is also used to build loyalty among existing customers and to tap into regional and international markets.
How can you localize your support across multiple countries and regions?
Ordinarily, if you wanted to localize customer support across regions, you’d need teams of agents who are fluent in your audience’s preferred language. That’s usually hard to scale, and pretty much impossible for small businesses.
Fortunately, that’s not the only way to do to engage in localization at scale.
With our intelligent bots, you can automate and localize your customer support in 50+ languages. You won’t even need to create separate conversation flows for each language. All you would need to do is create the flows for one language using our low-to-no code visual flow builder, and then use language keys to localize your chatbot conversations in the languages you want to support.
But localization does not just stop there.
Customers in different countries prefer engaging with customers over different channels. You need to engage them over the channel that they prefer, and even create an omnichannel experience.
The good news is that Engati can help you there as well. Your chatbot can be built once and deployed across 14 channels, including, but not limited to WhatsApp, Messenger, Telegram, and your website.
