Localization does not equal straight translation


That's right folks - localizing text, in particular marketing and promotional copy, is not simply a matter of finding a competent translator who has native fluency in both source and target languages. And I'm sure many of my readers already knew that.

So why mention it here? Because I've entered the land of SEO, particularly in the context of a multinational company where most localization starts with a central (and usually English language) source which is then adopted by a subset of our countries. An organically search engine optimized English web page will not be automatically optimized in the localized version.

In other words, having the most effective keywords determined for the source language cannot and will not absolve the page owner of the localized version of ensuring that someone performs keyword research for this content.

To delve further into the best practices of text localization, I've found that it involves a profound knowledge of how one can realistically or typically expect a culture to think. Are they taught critical and skeptical thinking in their education system? Do they belong to a dominant economy, or are they dwarfed by a superpower neighbour? Do high level concepts appeal to their thought processes, or meticulous, quantifiable data? Understanding what motivates and interests a collective of people, the target audience, and implementing these insights through writing is, in fact, crucial to successful localization.

It wasn't until I began exploring the differences in conducting business in Austria and Germany, who presumably share a common language, that this truly came to light for me. But, more on that in a later post.

Comments

  1. LOL don't I know it. I used to hate when the US team came up with descriptors such as "an area five times the size of Texas" 'coz then I'd have to go and look up Wikipedia to see how big Texas is (in metric) and find something local equivalent that added up to the same thing. Worse still, I was never really able to pursuade anybody that it was worth doing. Don't even get me started on some of the "sayings" (Americanisms) :-P

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  2. Hi Caesar: that's a great example of how localization can become necessary even when the target audience speaks the same language. By the way, I looked up the fact that Texas is roughly an 11th of the size of Australia. :-)

    A bit off-topic, but while in North America I'd noticed that people, when asked how far it was to someplace would often answer instead with the amount of (presumably) average time required to drive from point A to B, rather than distance in km or miles.

    That's an interesting way to contrast the differences in public transport between Dublin and Vienna: to get to the airport, it takes approximately 50 minutes and 20 minutes, respectively, from city centre, although the distances are just under 10km and 24km respectively.

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