Is it Possible to Localize Your Website by Yourself?
Localizing the content of your site is a must to be able to reach out to global clients. But this can bring you quite some headaches. It is possible to localize your website by yourself, but you must at least have some basic knowledge about website localization and about the tools being used for this. If you don’t have that you’d better ask a translation company to do it for you.
How to localize your website
Define the scope of the project for localization. Before you start with a web localization project, you must define he influence of the project on your business. You must know the things that must be translated, this way the customers may enjoy a localized user experience regardless, about where they are located. The number of languages you need to sustain, which ones are perfect to use and if or if not localization is meant for the website or for the mobile app. The need to translate a website, you need to translate some of the documents.
Try to avoid internationalization interruption. Internationalization is time consuming, normally, it takes 18 months to localize a website. This is because the developers must go through the app or the site to discover all of the texts and codes that must be translated, they must extract them, and this process is called strings file. To localize a website, the code must be rebuilt. One way to localize your website in a fast manner is to use a proxy translation.
You can make sure that the global presence is consistent and you can do that by making a style guide and the glossary for you translators even fore you start to localize your website. Your guide about the style will be the one to establish the format as well as the tone for the translator. This also goes for the spelling, grammar, syntax, and conventions. It will also be your guide for the translator with the brand voice and special standards linked with the languages and culture of the target clients.
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