The digital world is a dynamic place that operates in multiple geographic regions. Though English is recognized as a global means of communication, there is still a huge number of users accessing the web in their native language.
To deliver your message to a worldwide audience, you need to speak in their language. However, translating your web pages into multiple languages isn't just enough.
You also need to understand the correct usage of words and terminology to adhere to their local standards. This is achieved by the process of content localization. Continue reading the article to learn what it is and how you can adapt your message for a global audience.
What is Content Localization
Content localization means optimizing your content for multiple regional audiences. It is a process that ensures your content can be adapted globally without causing any cultural differences, language barriers, preferences, and other contradictory elements.
However, sometimes marketers consider only translating their web pages into major languages is what localization means. It is beyond just translating the words into a new language. The ultimate goal of localization is to make it more relevant, relatable, and culturally appropriate to a wider or global audience.
Steps to Adapt Your Message for a Global Audience
You can follow these approaches in order to make your content localized for a worldwide audience.
1. Define Your Goals
Begin your content localization strategy by first defining your goals and objectives. Each content marketing strategy is followed by having a specified goal in mind. The same goes for localization strategy and having a clear idea of what you want to achieve with it.
For instance, you can choose whether you want to increase brand awareness, generate leads, or drive sales in new markets. Once you determine your goals, you can reshape your localization strategy accordingly.
2. Research Your Target Audience
The fundamental factor in content localization is your audience and their needs. Therefore, you should learn about them through proper audience research. Identify who you want your content to reach, what their needs and preferences are, and what languages they speak.
Apart from learning the facts and figures, understand their behaviors, habits, cultural preferences, attitudes, pain points, and appropriate needs. Resultantly, you can better tailor your content for localization that offers not just their interest but also feeling valued.
3. Market Research
Having a sound knowledge of your market and competitors locally is vital, like learning about the target audience. You should broaden your research by including this knowledge.
Figure out if the targeted market would be beneficial for you, how competitive it would be for you, who the giants are in there, how you are going to build your identity, etc. By having an overview of the market, you can learn what is already popular and helpful to entice the audience.
4. Identify Content to Localize
First of all, remove the ambiguity that you need to localize only a few pages or specified content. You should include all content pieces without any discrimination. However, you should first learn which content to localize and prioritize during the process.
Rather than putting effort into new content creation, it is better to leverage older posts (which might be effort and cost-effective). The best approach is to start with your top-performing posts that already engage your audience well. Focus on your highest-converting pages, which might be your homepage or landing pages.
5. Consult with a Native
Consulting with a native person is the best approach to content localization strategy. No matter how deep you dig into market and audience research, there are still language and geographic cliches and nuances.
Moreover, you shouldn't rely on each and every result provided by translation tools. Whereas a native individual can help you better translate, edit, review, and publish your localized content.
This is because they better know and understand the intricacies and language norms. Moreover, they can also help you identify the lack and ambiguities in your content, making it well localized.
6. Leverage Transcreation
As foretold, localization isn't all about translating content into different languages. You need to comprehend the cultural and language priorities and contexts. For instance, potato fries in Britain are called “Chips” and “French fries in American English.
Although both are the same language, the change in dialects leads to different word usage. These are the things that are comprehended with the transcreation or creative translation.
It focuses on considering the complete context of the text and providing the most appropriate and geographically correct translation. During transcreation, the tone of voice, the cultural references, and the factual details are focused.
7. Refine the Language
While localizing content into different languages, the flow and consistency of sentences may get disturbed. Therefore, after the translation process, it’s essential for you to refine the language of the translated content.
Refining the language is important to make your message easily understandable for a broader audience. If you will simply use the content right after getting it translated through a tool, it could lead you to terrible results.
Hence, you should take proactive measures to resolve the inconsistencies and vocabulary issues to preserve the quality of content in its localized versions.
One such measure is a multilingual paraphrasing tool that rephrases your content and improves its readability. Using this paraphraser tool can eliminate redundancies from your text and make it engaging. It can be helpful for those who don’t want to compromise the quality of content when localizing it.
Conclusion
That's all the article has to say about content localization and how you can adapt your content for multiple audiences around the globe.
You can't follow a one-size-fits-all strategy in the localization journey by translating one page into multiple languages. Instead, you should carefully understand the cultural differences and nuances of the language for better content localization.
You should begin by defining your goals, learning about your target audience, marketing, and competitors, prioritizing content for localization, getting help from a native speaker, and leveraging transcreation and paraphrasing skills.
