Website localization: Your step-by-step guide to global success

Expanding to the global market is the primary objective for any online business, and if you look at the businesses that have succeeded in doing it, like Nescafe, Nike, or McDonald’s, it’s easy to see the huge difference a localized, multi-lingual website makes.

In this article, we explain the website localization process step-by-step, leaving you fully prepared to attract and engage with potential users from all over the globe. In addition to insights and advice on website localization, we’ll walk you through the tools that will save you time, effort, and resources, including Smartcat AI Translation, the Smartcat Website Translator, and Smartcat Integrations, and provide tangible tips on how to incorporate these and other tools into a highly successful website localization strategy. 

Website localization is when a website’s content is adapted to the customs and norms of a specific country or region. It touches upon every detail of the content, from words and phrases to color schemes, images, keyboard layouts, and even URLs. If something is deemed culturally inappropriate for a specific group is it removed from the site.

Simply put, the goal of website localization is to create and publish content that's respectful of an area's culture and is written in the user's local language.

When localizing your content on your web pages, it’s important to determine what you want to accomplish before you start. Firm goals allow you to make sure that your resources are not wasted as well and enable you to set metrics that help you track your progress.

During this planning phase, ask yourself and your team the following questions:

• What are your short- and long-term, measurable objectives? For example, you want to increase page views by 40% in a given country over the next six months. 

• What is your project deadline? i.e, when do you need the localized site launched? 

• Who is on your localization team? i.e. how many people do you have at your disposal externally and internally? What steps of the localization process are they involved in?

• What is your approach to activities? Ie, are you going to use the “waterfall” method (fulfilling tasks one by one) or the Agile method (involving all your teams simultaneously)?

• What is your budget? i.e. how much money do you currently have to spend on the project?

Let’s take a look at the precise steps you and your team need to take to create and publish a localized website.

Before you start translating your website content, you’ll need to have a clear idea of the content you plan on translating, how you will translate it, and which target languages you require. These decisions should be based on knowledge of your user base and market analysis.

Nearly 6,500 distinct languages exist worldwide today. Fortunately, approximately ten of these can reach the majority of internet users. Knowing exactly where you want to expand your business will guide which ones you need to select.

To narrow down your scope, use tools like Semrush or check out Google Trends to:

• Find where your target audiences are

• See where your competitor‘s traffic comes from

• Learn where your products are in demand and the competition is low

With this information, you can finalize your list of languages for localization. You will also want to explore the cultural norms of each local market, the preferred search engines, and whether the language is written from left to right or right to left.

The languages you choose for your localization efforts are only half of the equation. You also should select the sections of your site you want to translate. Localizing every page may not be too urgent, depending on your business model and the structure of the website itself. So it’s time to prioritize again.

High-priority pages include:

• Your home page

• Individual product pages

• High-traffic landing pages

Meanwhile, you may not need to localize the following content at all:

• Outdated blog posts

• Landing pages for stores in your own country

• Review pages submitted by customers in your own country

In some cases, it may even be better to commission entirely new content for your localized site instead of translating what’s currently there.

Making use of tools like a translation management system will allow you to translate much more content than simply sending documents via email back and forth between you and an agency. Today, cloud-based versions with live tracking and the latest AI technology allow you to translate your website a lot quicker with less budget, but keeping the content high.

• Technology. While technology will never completely replace human translators, it can streamline the process. For instance, many businesses use automated translation in conjunction with human editing to help minimize costs and ensure a quick turnaround time. Smartcat is a great example of this. We are the only software company to offer a platform built around custom AI-human workflows to achieve human-quality results.

• While Smartcat AI translation delivers ever-increasing quality (fewer edits are required the more you use it), embedded human workflows enabled by our Marketplace of 500,000 subject-matter experts deliver editing that is much more cost-effective than traditional outsourcing.

• Human resources. Your localization partner must have professional translators, editors, multilingual copywriters, and other specialists to complement your team in case you need them. Smartcat offers an industry-first with its AI-sourcing of translators, editors, and proofreaders from the industry’s largest marketplace of more than 500,000 experts. Our AI-matching algorithm analyzes content against linguist performance and subject matter expertise to match the right professional to your project.

• Keeping deadlines. Even if you opt for machine translation, it will require human editing, which may take quite a while. You must ensure the professionals you choose are available when you need them and can complete your tasks within the required time frame. Smartcat’s AI-human workflows work in tandem to allow review teams to set goals and collaborate efficiently on translated content, to ensure you can always meet your deadlines. 

• Quality Assurance (QA). A comprehensive QA process is required to guarantee that mistakes get detected and fixed. Whether the translation is machine or human-generated, a human must verify the work is accurate.

• In addition to Smartcat marketplace of expert language reviewers, Smartcat’s Translation Quality Score (TQS) performs real-time analysis of each sentence and phrase, saving review teams hours of work by allowing them to focus on only those edits that meet the criteria and threshold set by the content team. While it will always be necessary to have a human proofread content translations before publication, the TQS significantly reduces this workload and speeds up content production overall. 

Smartcat combines AI translation, collaborative AI human workflows, and a network of 500,000+ language professionals to serve your localization needs. It is the perfect solution to manage your translation projects and collaborate with teams across your organization saving up to 70% of management time and 50% of translation costs.

Once you've accomplished the steps above, you can move on to the action phase: translating and localizing your website.

Site design is often an overlooked element of accurate localization, but it's an important one to prioritize. Before you can start the translation process, you need to rework the basic architecture of your site so it can handle your chosen languages. This process is known as internationalization.

If you're lucky enough to read this article before launching your website, now is the perfect time to develop it with localization in mind. If not, the process can be more complicated. Here are the steps you should take:

• Find a way to accommodate different text lengths. Texts in European languages are typically longer, while many non-hieroglyphic texts in Asian languages are short.

• Separate images and text. Avoid using graphics that include text in the design, as the text length may change and impact the image composition. If you need images with text, remember to keep the text layer of the source image accessible for easy translation. 

• Prepare your CMS. Ensure all the plugins you use to support different languages and that you can easily switch between them.

• Make your website light. The quicker your website loads, the better the user experience will be since internet speeds vary widely from country to country. To make your website lighter, compress images, eliminate redirects, enable caching and asynchronous loading, and minify your CSS, JavaScript, and HTML code.

• Leverage a responsive design (or create a mobile version of your website). In many countries, people access the internet via smartphones or tablets, so optimizing for a small screen is crucial.

This list is not exhaustive, but the key idea is to ensure it’s possible to deploy your website in the target market without having to completely rebuild it.

After you've internationalized your site architecture, you can begin translation. However, a successful localization strategy involves much more than just a word-for-word text translation.

In addition to implementing the native language correctly, you’ll need to:

• Incorporate local metaphors and slang

• Include locally relevant and appropriate colors and symbols

• Take the local culture into account

This process is called transcreation. Here we take a look at a real example of how it was implemented by Canva.

Accurate translation is a key part of localization, enabling an organization to stand out from its competitors, reach wider markets, and better engage with its users. While some organizations use in-house translators or agencies to support their translation needs, increasingly companies are incorporating human-AI workflows for the most accurate and efficient translation of website content. Let’s take a look at some of the options you might wish to consider

• Your go-to software for website translation is the Smartcat Website Translator. This groundbreaking tool automatically translates your website content into multiple languages using automatic translation engines. It also uses smart translation assets like translation memory and glossaries to create on-brand results in any language, reflecting your preferred tone of voice, incorporating on-brand terminology, and adhering to linguistic preferences.  

• If you’re looking for support in both translation and localization, such as the specific targeting of multiple audiences and geographies at once, AI technology is here to help. AI leverages bilingual data and machine learning algorithms such as neural networks to fully support the entire localization process. For the accurate and fast translation and localization of content into 280+ languages Smartcat’s AI Translation tool is the ideal assistant for teams at this stage in the localization process. You can even create custom prompts to contextualize your translations for variants such as length or tone of voice, which is particularly useful when localizing your content for different audiences. 

• For those working with specific content creation tools such as WordPress, Contentful, or Drupal, Smartcat Integrations solve the problem of loading the translated text back into its original format without losing data by automating this often time-consuming process. The tool connects to your CMS, extracts the content, sends it for translation, and then inserts it back into the page exactly where it should be, saving you time, resources, and money.

AI-human workflows are the final piece in the translation and localization puzzle, with subject matter experts and linguists needed to perform final checks on AI-translated content for accuracy and context. Here, Smartcat can help you too. Our industry-first AI-matching algorithm analyzes content against linguist performance and subject matter expertise to match you to the right language professional from the Smartcat Linguist Marketplace of more than 500,000 experts.

Quality assurance and testing are the things that precede the localized website launch and are essential parts of the localization workflow. Why? Once, a translation mistake resulted in a $10 million campaign failure for the HSBC bank and there are dozens of stories like this one out there.

Though you needn’t be fluent in all the languages your content has been translated into, you still need to make sure the translations are correct. This process can be broken down into two parts: eliminating grammatical errors which can be done by a human or machine, and a final human (preferably native speaker) assessment covering language nuances such as local spelling specifics and ensuring adherence to the content team’s requirements. Smartcat’s Translation Quality Score (TQS) performs real-time analysis of each sentence and phrase to help you fulfill both tasks faster and more easily.

Technical testing helps you eliminate issues like design flaws, development bugs, and delivery glitches before they spoil the user experience and scare away your prospects. Start this process by asking your designers and developers to double- and triple-check that everything on your newly-localized website operates as intended.

Once everything has been checked, take the opportunity to get feedback from local users or customers before the project goes live. This feedback will help you avoid missteps in the tone of voice or messaging. You may also want to get a lawyer to run through all of your content before publication to ensure you have not violated any local laws or regulations.

After you've launched your website, it’s time to start optimizing it for better performance.

You must give your localized websites the same care and optimization as your primary site to ensure they perform well. The following should be prioritized at this stage:

• Keyword research. The same product or service can be referred to by different names even in one language. Your prospects might also use local slang, idioms, or unfamiliar terminology to find what they need. For this reason, you’ll have to review or redo your list of keywords based on the new location. Luckily, there are tools like Semrush that speed up and support this process. 

• Search engine differences. Google is the dominant search engine in many countries, but it's still important to check that it's the search engine of choice for users in your target location. Remember there are Baidu, Yandex, and Naver that have their own ranking algorithms.

• Geotargeting. You’ll need to consider whether you want to employ subdirectories (www.example.com/fr), subdomains (fr.example.com), or a country-specific URL (www.example.fr). Subdirectories are simplest, subdomains give you more flexibility, and country-specific URLs give you the best geo-targeting abilities. We’d also recommend adding hreflang tags/attributes to your pages to inform search engines that a specific page is written in a certain language.

In addition to keeping a close eye on search engine rankings, it’s important not to forget about optimizing the user experience. This is about keeping your translations up to date when you make changes to your primary site and translating the metadata and image Alt-texts.

• Automate content updates. You do not need to manually update every localized version of your site when you make a change to your primary site. Smartcat Integrations work here the same way they do when you need to upload your content to the tool and then push it back, saving you hours with every change.

• Be consistent. It’s crucial to ensure you use the same words or phrases to speak about the same or similar things across all languages. This can be done by creating a glossary or using a translation management system that learns from your edits and reuses existing translations.

So, what does localization look like in action? Here are three great examples of what localization looks like when it works.

The website-building platform Weebly is available internationally. Weebly worked with Smartcat to produce localized versions of the entire platform in languages including Russian, Japanese, German, and many others. As a result, Weebly is now available in all of the most popular languages in the world. The company can access 90% of the international market, making it significantly more competitive as a global website builder.

The skincare and bath product retailer Lush operates in more than 20 countries worldwide, requiring it to cover dozens of languages. What sets Lush apart is its choice to localize its pages, not just translate them. Each page is unmistakably Lush, but the actual language is changed to appeal to the specific audiences it targets in countries such as Germany, the UK, and France.

As an international shipping company, DHL must ensure that its site is easily understandable and localized effectively in every country it serves. This localization is particularly complicated because DHL must work well in Japanese and English, two very different languages. The company accomplished this by carefully considering how to blend different Japanese writing systems. The Japanese page includes kana and kanji, leading to phrases of different lengths while communicating effectively with the reader. This approach allows the page to look almost identical in both languages and neatly addresses the problem of static page architecture.

As you go through the process described above, you will have to manage multiple aspects of the project simultaneously. This may seem daunting at first, but the benefits of having a properly localized website are undeniable:

• Increased brand recognition across all target locations

• Boost in traffic and reduced bounce rate due to audiences’ higher engagement with your content

• More purchases and revenue as your products become easier to buy

• Increased customer loyalty and brand advocates

• More opportunities to reach out to non-locals in your domestic market

By working closely with an experienced localization partner who will ensure the smooth-running of the localization process, you’ll find you’re able to successfully bridge the language gap between your products and your prospects and reap the many benefits we’ve outlined here.