Importance of Local Market Adaptation

When globalization started to take flight, international companies believed that standardization and global uniformity was the right way to market and sell products around the world. Little by little, companies are realizing that it is more important to have a right balance of brand uniformity and local market adaptation. The uniqueness of each and every market in terms of culture and language is something that companies cannot afford to ignore. Businesses are waking up to the fact that:

• Visitors linger twice as long on multilingual websites as they do at English-only sites;
• Business users are three times more likely to buy a product or service when addressed in their own language;
• Customer service costs drop when instructions are displayed in the user’s native language
• Early movers to website localization cite a greater number of longer visits, higher sales, and more satisfied customers as benefits of their localization efforts.

In other words, modern companies are realizing that there is a competitive edge to developing a localization strategy. Localization should be considered a cost of doing business and not an option that can be disregarded easily.

Using Technology to Optimize Translation

The localization and translation industry, as in other modern industries has leveraged the use of technology to optimize its operations. Nowadays, state-of-the-art database technology can be used to capture and recycle human intelligence thus improving the efficiency of the localization process.

More often than not, documents that need to be localized contain many analogous terminologies and repetitive words that recur several times in the same document. Instead of repeatedly translating those recurring words, the database technology i.e. translation memory, automates what can be automated. It stores the sentences and phrases translated by the translator so that it can be reused for future projects to improve consistency and speed of translation. New projects can also be analyzed against translation memory created from previous translation projects.

The aforementioned Translation Memory is one of the tools that Sage Languages use in order to add efficiency to its operations, improve its production cycle, help control localization costs and set new quality standards.