Do your audiences think your messages are meant for them or against them?
In real estate, it’s location, location, location. Globally, it’s localization, localization… OK, but localization of products, marketing and training is the key to global success – localization includes new audiences and avoids excluding others.
Why? Culture is a double-edged sword. Clever references can help you create rapport with one audience, but just create a blank screen mentally with another. Localization, however, creates cultural authenticity. It ensures that your target audience is in on the joke and that your company reaps the rewards.
What Is Localization Really?
Localization is a process of adapting texts, or even whole products, in order to connect with your target audience on a cultural level. Depending on your text and your goals, that audience might include people who live in certain geographic locations, such as countries, regions or sometimes even cities, but it could also mean members of different groups who share common experiences, such as age, occupation or even religion.
Localization is often used as a fancier word for translation, but that’s not fair to translation or to localization. Translation is about language, while localization is about culture. Good translation should absolutely incorporate localization’s sensitivity to the audience’s cultural norms, but localization has a more specific mandate. It must go further to ensure an audience’s cultural connection with a text or product.
In fact, localization doesn’t have to involve separate languages at all. Here are two examples: a text written for an American audience localized into Australian English and a text written in general American English localized to appeal to software engineers in Silicon Valley. Who does your organization want to connect with?
Examples of Localization
When it’s important to appeal to and connect with an audience in just the right way, here are a few examples of what could or should be localized.
Photos, images and graphics: What might look like a simple, pleasant stock photo to you or me might actually offend wide swathes of the world. Yet, localizing images isn’t just about removing offensive pictures, it’s about recreating the feeling you’d like to convey in the way that your target audience understands it. This can include the choice of colors and symbols.
Address formats: The way addresses are written can vary a lot from country to country. When you’re referencing addresses, localizing the address format ensures that your audience knows exactly what is what. The same is true for weights, measurements, dates and currencies.
Cultural references: Cultural references have the power to enhance understanding of a topic and create closer connections with an audience. But they also have the power to shut you out if you aren’t in the know. Will Chinese audiences know the plot of a movie that’s been banned in their country? Will American audiences be familiar with the haircut of long-dead Argentine pop star? Localizing cultural references, or else removing them if there aren’t any effective equivalents, ensures that your audience will understand you every step of the way.
Other areas for localization will depend on the text, your target audience and your organization’s goals.
Localization Plus
For more than 20 years, Responsive Translation has been providing translation, localization and other foreign-language services to organizations around the globe. If you’d like to find out more about how we can help you, please contact us at 646-847-3309 or [email protected].
Image credit: wwikgren