Four Small Ways to Better Localize Your Online Business’s Page

By Sarah-Claire Jordan

In this day and age, if you have an online business that hasn’t been translated into at least one other language, you’re in the minority. Since there are practically no borders in terms of internet usage, meaning anyone from anywhere can access your page, it only makes sense to at least look at your customers and try to localize for the country that uses your page the most. Even if you do this for just one other country, you will see an improvement in sales almost immediately.

However, there are some things that literally get lost in translation when localizing an online business. They may be small, but these details, if you get them right, can make a huge difference in international customer satisfaction. Here are four small things to take into account when localizing your site:

1. What languages are spoken there?

If you think localization consists of just translating your site into the most common language spoken by the target audience, then you are mistaken. Many countries have more than one official languages, and are used to being able to choose which of those languages they want to navigate a site in. Luxembourg is a good example, as it has three official languages: German, French, and Luxembourgish. In order to connect properly with customers from multilingual areas, make sure your site is multilingual as well.

2. How do they like to pay?

In the U.S., we tend to pay for things online using a credit or debit card, or maybe a Paypal account. In other countries, however, other payment methods are more popular for making online purchases. In Spain as well as other European countries, for example, bank transfers are commonly used. Keep this in mind when localizing your site, so the payment options correspond with the options generally used by the target audience.

3. Does the language follow a different reading format?

As you probably know, not all writing systems work the same as English. Arabic, Hebrew, Japanese, and many other languages have writing systems that have a completely different format. Hebrew, for instance, is read from right to left, so that should be taken into account when formatting the web page to meet the needs of Hebrew speakers. This doesn’t just include text, however; this also affects placement of logos, pictures, advertisements, and any other visual content.

4. What currency is used?

This probably seems like an obvious change to make when localizing your site, but even if you switch from dollars to euros, you may still run into small problems. For instance, some countries use a decimal point the way we in the U.S. would use a comma to separate digits in larger numbers. So you can’t relax once you switch all the dollar symbols over to euro, pound, and other currency symbols, because if you aren’t careful you may be showing your customers the wrong prices thanks to using a comma instead of a decimal point. Aside from that, some customers in certain countries are used to not only seeing the price in the local currency, but also in U.S. dollars. This reassures them that they haven’t been ripped off by your company.

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Tags: localization, marketing

Category: Business Translation