Please don’t make the mistake of assuming that your well-crafted content for a North American audience in English can still be sent out in its current form to an audience anywhere in any part of the world. Have you ever had the experience of reading a foreign website that was simply translated? More often than not, it misses the benchmark in clarifying the core intent, and you begin to make assumptions about the company and its goal.
There is a wonderful story of the Coca-Cola brand name translated into Chinese as, “bite the wax tadpole.” This is problematic for many reasons, and we haven’t even gotten beyond the brand name. Think of the sheer number of words (not to mention the images and videos) in your content, anyone of them could be equally as problematic in one of your hoped-for foreign markets or for your distant customer segment.
Content Localization addresses this issue. It’s the process of adapting your content to a specific destination, ensuring that it has been translated and adapted in a culturally-sensitive way so that an audience on the other side of the world can feel right at home and like the content was designed for them and in their native language.
Content globalization and localization are the two sides of a single coin: while the content globalization side is the process of simplifying content to make it more generalizable to other languages and cultures; the content localization side is the process of taking that content and putting the local touch on it.
To build an effective global strategy, we must pay attention to both sides of that coin.