Your website can be your most valuable marketing tool. Having a multilingual website can have a great impact on your sales and improve your online presence, if you are willing to increase your exports and enter new foreign markets. To make sure that you understand the globalization, internationalization, and localization processes, we explain here what that means for your company:

For any company with an international scope, internationalization is critical during the website planning phase and, should be considered when the website is being designed. This will minimize the work that needs to be done for localizing it.

Localization is the actual adaptation of your website, and can be described as the process of converting the format and content of a website to a form that is linguistically and culturally appropriate to a particular market, including translation, keywords, images  or colour changes,  regulatory modifications, etc.. It is the adaptation of graphics, navigation, optimization and much more.

You may wonder if both words  mean the same thing. In many cases,  translation and localization differ.

Translation is the process of converting written text or spoken words into another language. The completed translation should be the most accurate rendition possible of the source material.  An accurate translation requires changes in word order and sentence structure, and choosing the most appropriate word in the target language when there is more than one option, as there often is.

In localization, materials are not only translated into a foreign language but also adapted to fit a foreign culture. Translation deals primarily with texts and words, and translation is just the beginning. Localization deals not only with translation, but also with graphics, colours, technical aspects of the website, keywords,  multilingual SEO… so your website is easily found by your customers, in search engines, and it better suits the target audience.

The internationalization of the website architecture at the beginning of design will ensure a streamlined localization process. With a large expertise in localization of websites, Openvalley will make this process efficient, easy and cost-effective for your organization.