Six Major Reasons for Software Localization

Operating in only your region and the neighborhood is not good enough for today’s market and competition levels since it has gone international.

Softwarelocalization is the process of adapting a software product to the linguistic and cultural requirements of a target market. This process is labor-intensive and often requires a lot of time from the development teams. In most case today, software localization is done in the early stages before even writing the software.

Tips for efficient Software Localization.

Always consider software localization in the software designing and development stages as this will promote consistency and as well cut the localization costs because it is earlier planned for.

One should make sure that the content for the software is of very high quality to be adopted on international markets. Don’t write focusing on just a particular society or country as that may be misunderstood or looked at as bias in a different society for example the use of slangs.

Avoid making global or international assumptions basing the local market and audience’s culture, language, history, preferences and many other factors as these may vary with in different societies.

Make sure your software interface and design concepts, product packaging, documentation and a lot more are well formulated and internationalized to be able to meet the global markets and fulfill everyone’s requirements.

Reasons for Software Localization

Increase in Sales and product Market. With software or website localization, one’s sales are expected to rise at a very high rate. This is simply because localization multiplies your expected market to the global or international level hence increased business revenue.

Risk Reduction and Management. When your software, applications, products or websites are localized, it helps in risk reduction and management. This is possible because some languages share some words but with different meanings and therefore marketing your software when not localized may spread the wrong product information leading to liabilities and offending possible clients. But localization helps pass on the information clearly saving you all the losses and risks in the target market.

Localization caters for the local market. Major businesses and websites and software applications are always designed targeting the urban or a particular part of the population leaving out the local consumers. But with software localization, the software, applications and websites are translated in to different global languages, therefore, enabling the local consumers in different global regions to understand and access the products as well.

Balancing the global Markets: Any marketing strategy would make no sense without localization. For example a good advert would make no sense to the audience or the target market if they cannot understand the language used in the campaign which limits you from reaching your full potential. Therefore, software or website localization helps you to balance your global markets since every region is able to understand their products well in their respective languages. This as well eases brand expansion in any local market at any time you want.

Easy Interaction with the Software. Software localization enables the users to easily interact with the software or the website since it’s designed in the languages that they so much familiar with. Software designed in English however important it may be in China, it will never achieve its targets unless localized to Chinese or Mandarin for easy use by the clients.

Overcome Competition. Today’s business has so much improved and runs on the global or international level. Therefore, one cannot be able to compete on the world market with their software designed in just one language, let say English. Software localization helps the developers out-compete their competitors in the same line of business since all global markets can be able to access and understand their products.

Software localization therefore, is an important factor that benefits both the software developers and the users or the consumers. However, software localization should only be done by qualified or trained personnel or a recognized translations agency.

For professional software translation and localization, contact KL Translations Ltd. We deliver translate and localize various softare. Email us at sales@kltranslations.com