Our world is growing more accessible and globalized every day. Due to the internet and other tech innovations, information flows at high speed from one end of the world to another. As a result, every individual has access to a vast number of websites from around the world – an efficient economic catalyst with diverse possibilities for business.
If you’ve tried to promote your website in various places worldwide, you’ve surely encountered two kinds of issues: linguistic and cultural.
The linguistic challenge is obvious. People in different countries speak different languages, so potential clients in a new market probably won’t understand your content. Cultural issues pose a natural obstacle. People around the world have diverse lifestyles and varying cultural and economic needs and consumer habits. What works in Israel won’t necessarily work elsewhere. Tailoring your product or service to local audiences is called localization. If you’re interested in expanding your business internationally, you need translation and localization solutions. To understand the importance of localization, we’ll start by explaining the concepts of localization, globalization and internationalization.
What’s Internationalization?
Internationalization is to some extent the opposite of localization – seeking to make your product/service as general as possible. To do so, people generally use English as a lingua franca and rely on the most basic shared concepts that unite people everywhere.
What’s Globalization?
Globalization is in essence the business process of expanding to international markets and is in one sense a combination of both localization and internationalization. A business owner offering a product or service in as general or neutral a manner as possible to be comprehensible and desirable around the world – that’s internationalization. At the same time, the content must be tailored to the specific audience – that’s localization.
Localization
To solve these linguistic and cultural dilemmas, it’s best to rely on website translation services. A translator converts the language of your website to that of the destination country so clients feel at ease and can use it even if they don’t speak English or Hebrew.
Localization is based on in-depth research of the target culture and adjusting the product or advertising to match. With over 1,000 experienced professional translators to meet your exact needs, Hever Translations is the ideal company for translation and localization solutions. Thanks to over 60 years of experience, Hever Translations has built the ultimate one-stop shop for streamlining the localization process of a product or service.