What is Website Localization?

Introduction

Have you ever seen some advertisements that are catered around your current trends? For example, Spotify understanding the current trends of the youth and displaying ads like this classic: group of friends always plan a long trip but it always remain in the chats 😀

Google Sign-in page in English

Ikea showing no assembly service option for India region

. You can read more about Ikea’s localization strategies on the same.

All these examples you see are focused on improving the user’s experience. It takes a lot of research and understanding of the user’s region to come up with this user experience. But websites like these makes use you of concept called as website localization to achieve the same.

So in this blogpost, we will be exploring website localisation, how it differs from translation and its multiple use cases.

So without any further ado, let us get started!!

What is Website Localisation?

Website localisation is a method/a way to make sure the website adapts to the user’s location so that the experience is enhanced.

Adaption of a website based on user’s location can mean a lot of things like:

• Making sure the website’s content is aligned correctly i.e. LTR or RTL.


• Making sure the images, audio and videos are appropriate as per the user’s region.


• Making sure the text is translated according to the user’s location.

Combining all the ways of adaption, website try to create a personalised experience for the user which make them feel familiar and isn’t hard to navigate.

Is Website localisation same as text translation ?

We can say that text translation is a part of localisation i.e. localisation is a super set of text translation.

Text Contraction in Arabic

Content Relevance And Placement

Another key aspect of website localisation is the making sure the content is relevant and placed correctly on the website.

Content Relevance

If you have observed food chains such as McDonald’s or KFC, they have different menus for different countries. They make sure that menu are created in such a way that the items available, are as per the local traditions and adhere to the culture neutral zone.

For example, In US you would find a big mac burger made out beef patty, it’s equivalent in India is Maharaja Mac burger with a chicken patty.

The Big Mac

Content Placement

Another important factor on websites is the content placement. Let us look at this via examples,

Websites needs to make sure that their content caters for users from all the regions. A person from a middle eastern region, would generally prefer their text to be placed in right to left format instead of left to right.

Here is a look at how the IKEA’s website looks like for an arabic region as compared to the India version of the website:

IKEA website of Indian region in English language

As you can see in the above images that text is preferred in right to left format for Arabic region as compared to the India version. Another keen example of content placement in this scenario is the placement of the language change button(highlighted in green) and the tablist(highlighted in blue). If you see, for Arabic region both the button and tablist starts from right which isn’t the case for Indian region of the site.

These minute details creates a thoughtful user experience for a variety of regions. Thus content placement is one of the important aspects of the website localization.

Hyperlocalisation

It is a kind of localisation that is very specific to the user’s needs and most of the time it caters to user’s preferences. This helps the websites create a deeper and personalized impact with the user. We can consider hyperlocalisation to be an advanced version of website localisation which focuses much on content relevance.

A classic example that I found Spotify's Audience Targeting to achieve Hyperlocalization

There are a lot of examples on hyperlocalization, some of them we saw in the introduction section of the blog. Hence it is important for products that revolve around user’s bevhavior to have hyper-localization.

How can this be achieved?

There are many products out there such as , , etc can be used to achieve these experiences. Diving into the details and the general working of these products is out of scope of this blog post. But do give these products a try.

Summary

In this blogpost, we learned various aspects of website localization including it’s definition and how it differs from text translation. We also delved into various use cases which achieve website localization and how they create an impactful user experience.

So that’s all folks!. Hope you like my blog post.

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