Localisation is required when you’re lost in translation

As geographically separate regions of the earth are brought ever closer together by the pervasiveness of the World Wide Web, it is only natural that businesses attempt to extend their reach beyond national boundaries via their online presence.

However, ‘internationalising’ a site is a far more involved process than merely translating it, and without intelligent international research with native users, it is not possible to truly localise a site.

Even the most well-intentioned business or brand will struggle to succeed in providing a good user experience online if it is not fully localised. Such companies shouldn’t be reticent getting outside help with localisation. Within Foviance we have many years of experience carrying out research internationally via our network of trusted partners.

Much of the international user research we have conducted has proven useful to businesses weighing up the decisions over their international strategy. For example, is it wise to launch a ‘skin’ (white-label) version of their brand? Is there a particular market gap not yet covered by competitors? Should they invest strongly in affiliate marketing and acquisition, or invest strongly in retention (some markets are more brand-promiscuous for particular products than others)? Should they simply hire a local partner to run their site for them? Taking the time to talk with end users in their own environment often reveals cultural idiosyncrasies that ultimately guide preferences, which in turn should drive those strategic decisions. This extra care, as well as making sure a site is fundamentally usable in a particular market, is pivotal to the success of an online brand attempting to compete abroad.

Often, usability issues you might never have thought of will surface through hands-on group sessions. Take for example some recent work we conducted with a client who is trading in several international markets. It provided perfect evidence for the ‘translation is short of localisation’ concept, when in a focus group session involving Spanish users we found a few of them trying to divide 24 by 7. Who would have thought that Spanish people wouldn’t know what was meant by 24/7? It took them a while to understand that customer service would be available to them 24 hours a day, 7 days a week – something that is pretty important.

One of the most interesting talks I attended during EGR Live (a conference and exhibition for the online gaming industry) saw CEOs of two South American online gaming companies explain how important it was to understand Latin American culture if you want to succeed in that market. Putting aside the obvious problems with the fact that it is illegal to gamble in those countries and you need to be prepared to pay a few people to let you make it happen, two secrets to wooing the typical South American punter are to watch the same evening soap as them and to send them rewards on their birthdays! In that part of the world, success is all about personal relationships, and appreciating that there are small local neighbourhoods and common languages, not just one common mother tongue.

There are numerous pitfalls to merely translating a site without carrying out local research in target countries. Such an approach is likely to compromise the customer experience altogether and send hordes of users elsewhere. Even translations within the same broad language can fail when there are fine peculiarities between regional versions and dialects that make all the difference. For example, some typical phrases in European Spanish like ‘Come and play’ simply don’t work in South American Spanish.

Foviance not only has a network of trusted partners upon which we rely upon to carry out research, we also have a great deal of experience in managing these projects. We’ve become highly skilled at consolidating findings and delivering international consistency in the research by wrapping it all up in a packaged solution. Ultimately their trust in our judgement enables our clients to make informed strategic decisions regarding the markets they want to trade in, as opposed to making language-based tactical changes to sites, forever based on intuition and doomed to a lukewarm effect.

This article was written as part of our February newsletter