Product Localization: What It Is and Benefits for Businesses

What is product localization?

Product localization is the process of adapting a product or service to the language and cultural norms of people in a specific city, region, or country. In this globalized environment, the product can be in any form, including physical, virtual, or hybrid.

Today, many global businesses are translating their websites, software products, and mobile applications into various foreign languages to reach more target customers across the world. For instance, an e-commerce store may want to translate product information, blogs, and user-generated content on its website into different languages to provide a seamless experience for users and generate more revenues.

However, product localization does not just stop at translating product documentation, web content, and marketing materials into a different language. It emphasizes modifying the features of the product to fit the needs of target customers. For example, if you are offering a mobile application, you may need to adapt the user interface (UI) elements such as menus, color combinations, navigation components, icons, images, and graphics to local markets.

So product localization typically requires both the translation of the product-related content into the target language and the adaptation of product features to the local market.

This article explains everything you need to know about product localization.

Why Product Localization is Important

Businesses should consider localizing their products to address language barriers between countries and meet the cultural norms of local people.

• Address language barriers: Language is the biggest barrier to global expansion because not everybody in the world speaks the same language. For instance, no more than 27% of the world’s population speaks English. The other popular languages in the world are Chinese (16%), Hindi (8.3%), Spanish (7%), French (3.6%), and so on. If you restrict your business to only English, Chinese or Spanish, you will lose the opportunity to serve people around the world. Localization makes your products multilingual and eliminates language barriers successfully.
• Meet the cultural norms of local people: The cultural environments of no two countries are the same. If businesses don’t consider cultural norms during the journey of international expansion, they will face outrage from the local people. Let’s take the Mitsubishi Pajero, a widely accepted Japanese car, to explain why localization is vital during international expansion. In Spanish-speaking countries, “Pajero” is a slang word with a pejorative meaning. To meet the cultural norms of the Spanish-speaking population, Mitsubishi changed the name of Pejaro to Montero while launching the car in Spain.

How Product Localization Works

The product localization process involves a range of steps, including internationalization, actual product localization, and localization testing.

Internationalization

Internationalization is the process of creating products that are easily adaptable to different markets. It means you will create a universal product that no longer needs to be recreated from scratch when you want to pitch it to a new target market.

Actual Product Localization

This is the stage where you adapt the product to meet the needs and expectations of potential customers in new target markets.

There are two components in the actual product localization: language translation and functionality modification.

• Language translation: There are over 7,000 spoken languages in the world. Translating your product into all these languages can be time-consuming and futile. Therefore, you should conduct thorough market research and make your language translation decisions based on real-time data.
• Functionality modification: This emphasizes modifying features of the product to match the expectations of local customers.  If you are localizing a mobile application, you may need to modify elements such as layouts, menus, graphics, colors, images, payment methods, currencies, integrations, and so on.

Localization Testing and Quality Assurance

Localization testing, also called on-device testing, is a process of checking the quality of your translations before launching the product into the real environment.

The most widely-used localization testing strategies are linguistic, functional, and regional testing.

• Linguistic testing: It checks for typos, fluency of localized content, missing placeholders, concatenations, and so on.
• Functional testing: It checks for navigation errors, cultural appropriateness of images, visuals, and other elements, load times and responsiveness of the product, customer experience, and software compatibility with the hardware.
• Regional testing: It checks for product compatibility with regional compliances such as GDPR (The General Data Protection Regulation) in the European Union and CCPA (California Consumer Privacy Act) in California.

The main benefits of localization testing are high-quality translations and increased brand credibility in new markets.

Benefits of Product Localization

Product localization offers many benefits, including an opportunity to reach a broader audience, increased user experience, increased customer satisfaction levels, and higher revenues.

Reach a Broader Audience

Product localization allows you to serve more people across the world. Since localization eliminates language and cultural barriers for your products, you will be able to establish your business in global markets and create a broader customer base for your brand worldwide.

For instance, if you offer a video game only in the Japanese language, your target market is limited to just the 128 million Japanese-speaking population. The localization of this Japanese video game to English-speaking countries such as the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, and others, will provide you with an opportunity to reach more than 1.5 billion people across the world.

Improve Customer Satisfaction and Brand Loyalty

Product localization emphasizes modifying the features of the product to meet the expectations of local customers. These modifications help users engage with the product more and explore all the features of the product in a meaningful manner. This often translates into higher customer satisfaction levels. A satisfied customer will spread positive word of mouth about the product in the market and become loyal to the brand.

Higher Revenue

In a recent survey, 84% of businesses said that localization has positively impacted their revenue growth.

There are two ways product localization helps you achieve higher revenues:

• Increased search engine traffic: Since localization emphasizes translating your website content into multiple languages, you will get an opportunity to rank your website for low-competition keywords your competitors don’t target. This practice provides better search engine visibility for your content and draws higher search engine traffic to your website.
• Higher conversions: 76% of online shoppers prefer purchasing products from websites that present product information in their native language. It means that multilingual websites have an edge in converting visitors into customers when compared to single-language websites. The increased conversion rates will result in higher revenues.

Choose OneSky App for Top-tier Product Localization

A product localization strategy is a must if you plan to expand your business in the international arena. It helps you address the language and cultural barriers during your expansion journey and reach a broader audience for your business worldwide.

OneSky is an all-in-one product localization platform with experience serving over 1,000 customers. With a team of over 1,000 localization experts and a reliable translation management system (TMS), OneSky will provide high-quality translations for your websites, web apps, mobile apps, and video games.

Businesses across verticals worldwide trust OneSky for the following reasons:

• Ability to translate products into 50 languages in 70 countries.
• A superior translation management platform, which automates the translation workflows.
• Direct communication with translators.
• Integrations with all major product development platforms.
• Supports over 19 file formats.
• On-device testing for quality assurance.
• A strategic mix of human translation
• Tailored project management for complex localization projects.

Sign up for free to learn more about OneSky’s top-tier product localization platform!