One *More* Thing to Localize
First you figured out that it wasn’t sufficient to localize your products and leave your Web content in English. To attract and support a worldwide audience, you needed to localize a lot of your online content.
Next you saw that you couldn’t simply translate the keywords you use on your site into Chinese, French, Italian and other languages. People in those countries look for different phrases, and you needed to explore MSEO (multilingual search engine optimization).
Now comes social media, and almost as many ways to get it wrong as to get it right. Nadja Specht posted recently on the different ways in which Brazil, Germany and China – to name three countries – use social media and networking. This is a localization problem, although not one that most localization project managers would need to address. It’s a marketing function, I think.
Seem daunting? It needn’t be, even for a relatively small organization. If you’re a Chinese company with lots of customers in the U.S., for example, you might be able to accommodate both audiences with culture-aware, local employees in each market.
John White of venTAJA Marketing is a localization project manager and consultant. He is also a marketing communications writer for technology and language companies.
photo credit: photodaisy